I have a nasty habit of discovering excellent series in the middle. Very seldom am I lucky enough to read a novel with characters and situations that I thoroughly enjoy, and then later discover that they have been carried over into new novels. Instead, what often happens is that I find out a book I liked is from the middle (or sometimes end) of an excellent series, and I am forced to backtrack and collect the previous books.
Needless to say, I was not lucky enough to catch Manny Rupert, Jerry Stahl's flighty ex-cop drug addict turned private detective, in his first book, Plainclothes Naked. However, Pain Killers is only the second novel in a what will hopefully be a longer series.
Stahl's writing has always had an edge to it. Not surprising, considering that his real life exploits (as recounted in Permanent Midnight: A Memoir) have been a tad edgy themselves. But it isn't the edge that makes Stahl's writing so good. It is the way he manages to combine it with a dark humor that doesn't flinch at the ugliness unfolding around it. A drug addict ex-policeman posing as prison rehab counselor in order to investigate a possible ex-Nazi in hiding shouldn't be funny. But then Stahl throws lines at you like "If I were a pedophile, I'd paint kittens." He knows what shouldn't be funny, and he knows how to make you laugh at it.
Manny Rupert isn't the kind of hero you root for because he's one of the good guys. He's the guy you root for because, as depraved as he is, he's nowhere near as bad as the people he is surrounded by. Besides, at least he can see the humor of it all, as bitter as it may be. If you're like me, and prefer your leading man to be less than perfect, you'll definitely want to pick up a copy of Pain Killers.
A few weeks ago, I posted a blog entry in response to all of the ludicrous, insensitive, and racially bigoted statements being made at the time about Sonia Sotomayor. The title of the blog post was a simple question:
Are All Republicans Racist?
Obviously, many conservatives took exception to the question. They felt I was assuming that the actions of a few were indicative of the views of anyone subscribing to the same belief system. I didn't apologize, but instead pointed out that if they don't think these people are representing their own views, maybe they should see about removing their sorry asses from the public eye.
The fact that former South Carolina Senator Rusty DePass made a joke referring to an escaped gorilla as a possible descendant of Michelle Obama's might be bad enough. The fact that his apology for the statement included the phrase "...if I offended anyone," implying that the racist statement he made ("...clearly in jest...") wasn't offensive too him, but might have been taken the wrong way by others, could definitely be considered as adding insult to injury. His final insistence that the comment "...was hers, not mine," a somewhat half-assed attempt to insist that the Michelle Obama is responsible for the comment because she is not a Creationist, is truly the perfect example of the obliviousness that GOP leaders and spokespersons feel the need to display on a daily basis.
quite possibly for not being smart enough to know exactly how far you can push something until it blows up in your face. Granted, we definitely haven't sen the last of her. On top of whatever talk or game shows she exploits herself over the next year, you can be sure that the anti-gay marriage organizations will be holding her up as a martyr for the cause, claiming that she was fired because of her religious and moral beliefs, and not for being stupid.
That's one over-sensationalized airhead out of the way. But we still have another one taking up airtime, and I have a feeling that she won't be receiving a pink slip anytime soon.
There have been a lot of celebrity ego battles taking place in the past six months or so. Most of them have been political in nature, and all of them have been highly entertaining. Rush Limbaugh alone has supplied half of the ego conflicts, as he has forced one Republican politician after another to apologize for implying that he might be wrong or out of line. Then you have Jon Stewart, who has drawn heat from television news media personalities by criticizing their performances. The conflict there usually involves them bad mouthing Stewart on their shows, followed by Stewart promptly handing them their asses on his.
The latest one, of course, is the little brouhaha between David Letterman and Sarah Palin over some admittedly off-color jokes about her older daughter, Bristol.
You remember Bristol Palin, right? The one that managed to get knocked up in an Abstinence-Only household, outed by her own mother's campaign managers, then paraded around by Palin during the presidential primaries as some sort of testament to teenage morality because she didn't get an abortion? The one that appeared on the today show to preach abstinence with her newborn daughter in tow? Yeah, we all remember Bristol.
As we all know, the Palin's didn't take too kindly to the jokes, and released statements saying as much. But they also accused Letterman of making the jokes about their fourteen year-old daughter, and not Bristol.
Now, my immediate reaction is to claim that Palin knew very well that the jokes were about Bristol, and that she merely took advantage of Letterman's omission of her name in the jokes to make up this whole kiddie-rape-isn't-funny argument. Of course she knew the jokes were about Palin. Anyone with half a brain and a sense of humor knew he was talking about Bristol.
But then again, whether Palin has half a brain is debatable. Remember, this is the same woman who couldn't name one newspaper or magazine she reads when asked. The one who said she knows about foreign policy because she can see Russia from Alaska. The one who gave a TV interview about animal compassion while a turkey was killed right behind her. The one who didn't realize that saying she 'chose' not to have an abortion actually implied a belief in the pro-choice movement's arguments. The one who... I could go on, but you get the idea. Sarah Palin, for the most part, is about as smart as a box full of retarded mice. And that's giving her the benefit of the doubt.
With this in mind, we really can't assume that Palin was smart enough to realize that Letterman's jokes about her daughter getting knocked up were a reference to her older daughter, who was actually knocked up. There really isn't enough evidence to convince me that she isn't that dense. And I really doubt her snowmobiling hubby is the thinker in the family, so the idea of him explaining the joke to her is out of the equation.
So Letterman addresses the issue on his show. He admits that the jokes were in poor taste, but clearly explains for the dimmer viewers in his audience (like Palin) that the jokes were about Bristol, and that he would never make sex jokes about a fourteen-year-old girl. Granted, he read the jokes again, and refused to apologize for the 'Slutty Air Hostess' crack. But that's why Letterman is still around. He knows what to apologize for, and when not to back down.
With that taken care of, what are the odds that Palin is smart enough to take the apology and bow out while she is ahead?
Are you kidding me? The same Palin that reacted to the magazine debacle by blaming 'gotcha journalism', responded to the 'I can see Russia from my House' debacle by reiterating that it was true, that explained the Turkey fiasco by insisting that no one knew turkeys were being slaughtered behind her, and complained about media coverage of her knocked-up daughter while parading her around on the campaign tour?
So, instead of taking the smart way out, Palin and Todd (why the hell is Todd Palin giving out any kind of press releases? Who cares what this jackass thinks?) refuse Letterman's apology, turn down his invitation to come on his show, and then imply that he is a pedophile by stating that they don't want to let young Willow Palin near him.
This morning, Palin makes an appearance on the Today Show. In the same interview, she tells Matt Lauer that he is "extremely naive" if he accepted Letterman's explanation of the joke, then defends her statement about keeping Willow away from Letterman by saying "You can interpret that however you want to interpret it." Of course, because Lauer would have to be extremely naive to think that she was implying that Letterman was a baby-raper.
Its funny, but all of Prejean's senseless babbling over the past month still makes more sense than Palin's idiotic attempts at being clever and astute. She then put the cherry on top of the Moron Sundae by replying to Lauer's question about whether she is the future of the GOP with the convoluted phrase "Absolutely not necessarily." Then, after showing herself to be as vapid and mindless as Miss California, she goes on to say that she wants to "be able to help the cause" of the Republican Party.
Screw professionalism. Professionals like Jennings and Brokaw played nice and stepped aside while the Bush administration bulldozed this country into a war it had no business starting. Its about time that we had some television journalists willing and ready to show these opportunists the same respect they give, and call some of the interviewees on the shameless crap they spin day in and out. I'll take a little raw truth and reality over a professional demeanor any day.
I grew up in an age before the electronics boom, when the VCR was still a fairly new product, and computers weren't even close to being affordable for everyday folks. That's right all you whippersnappers reading this, there was an age in which the land linetelephone was still the main form of communication. It was called The Eighties. But I digress...
As a young child with literary aspirations in an era before blogs and laptops, I taught myself how to use a typewriter, an old electric one from my grandmother's attic. It hummed like a malfunctioning transformer, and sounded like a jackhammer when you pressed the keys. I would have to wrap the thing in a towel and rest it on my lap if I wanted to type at night without waking the people in the apartment below us.
Anyway, as weird as it may seem, I occasionally miss the old clunky typewriters, and have occasionally wondered in the past if there might be a way to turn one into a laptop, or at least a functioning keyboard. Not being technically advanced in my knowledge of computers and other things that I use on a daily basis, I never gave it much thought beyond that.
Other people, however, rise to such challenges, and so this morning, while looking for gardening tips, I stumbled upon this.
Stuart, the focus of Alexander Masters' book, is as enigmatic and polarizing as real people tend to get. There is a reason that Masters introduces us to Stuart now, rather than beginning at the childhood that spawned this creature.
Stuart is akin to a horrific train wreck that you can not tear your eyes away from; he is scary and depressing, repulsive and untantalizing, yet somehow silumtaneously mesmerizing and endearing. You wouldn't want to share an elevator or a dark alley with this character, but you might somehow find yourself compelled to do so anyway. Not only to hear the outlandish tales of the chaos that Stuart has both wrought and endured, but for the occasionally glimpses of the wise and witty soul buried beneath layers of abuse, neglect, and self-loathing.
Masters takes the reader backwards through Stuart's life, exposing events as the occurred, then revealing events that laid the groundwork prior to them. Like an archeologist peeling back layer after layer of cultural sediment and fossilized civilizations, Masters removes the grimy layers of Stuart one anecdote at a time. By the time you reach the core of such a being, the young child faced with emotionally crippling systematic abuse, you can feel pity for the man's origins, but you still might not be able to bring yourself to forgive him for what that child has begun. That's probably how Stuart would like it.
Forwards or backwards, Stuart's life is an engrossing story worth reading. But reading it backwards, believe it or not, tends to make more sense.
Autobiographical tales featuring survivors of drug addiction and substance abuse have always been popular. There is something intriguing about listening as someone describes hitting rock bottom, and then somehow managing to miraculously turn themselves around.
Of course, such books are so popular that one must sometimes wonder whether the facts have been embellished for the sole purpose of entertainment. The debacle surrounding A Million Little Pieces alerted the literary community to the dangers behind that. While biographies involve investigations on behalf of the author, autobiographies become suspect, as the possible motivations of the self-diarists make them unreliable witnesses at best.
This is where David Carr's book steps away from the rest of the pack. The Night of the Gun almost doesn't qualify as an autobiography. He remembers very little of what actually occurred during his days of drug abuse, and what he does remember is almost wholly unreliable. So, be an investigative reporter, he uses the skills on hand to delve into the mystery that is his own life.
This is where Carr's book leaves the others behind. He wanders through the down and out periods of his life with a grim curiosity that never lapses into self-pity or melodrama. He could be writing about somebody else entirely, and in some ways, he is. His style isn't emotionless; one would have to be truly cold and indifferent not to feel something while looking back on some of the things Carr did had had done to him. But there is a slight detachment from the source material that keeps his observations from becoming self-serving or, even worse, self-pitying. He not only makes no excuses for his own actions, he doesn't even understand some of them himself.
Carr's book will appeal to fans of similar books, such as Permanent Midnight, but don't expect a carbon copy of the format. If Carr's story doesn't appear to have the obviously uplifting ending or tone that you were expecting, that's because it wasn't meant to be that kind of book. Carr isn't telling us his story so we can learn from his mistakes. He exploring his own painful past, like probing the raw nerve beneath a sore tooth, because he just can't bring himself to leave it behind, at last not without knowing what it all must have appeared from the outside looking in.
Let me start by flatly stating that I don't think that all Republicans are racist. I've never been a big fan of blanket statements, having snuggled warmly under dozens tossed over me by other less scrupulous people. It would be foolish of me to assume that someone thinks a certain way just because they belong to a certain group or organization.
I don't know any hardcore Republicans myself. I know a couple of conservatives, but both of them differ enough with the party that they tend to hesitate when asked their political affiliation. So I really don't have anyone I trust that I could ask directly. I suppose I could ask some random Republican, but I a feeling that walking up to a stranger in a parking lot and asking them if they are a racist because of the McCain/Palin bumper sticker on their car is a good way to test the limits of my current medical insurance.
This leaves me to base my opinion of Republicans based on how their political and media spokespersons behave in the public eye.
This, as you can well imagine, where I would get such an idea from.
Ever since (actually, even before) Obama announced Sonia Sotomayor as his Supreme Court pick, talking heads from the far right have been complaining about the ludicrousness of picking a Hispanic woman to sit on the Supreme Court. You've got Pat Buchanan expressing outrage that all four of the potential picks were women, and Tom Tancredo claiming that her membership in the largest Hispanic civil rights organization in America was tantamount to belonging to a "Latino KKK." Some of them have stooped to making fun of the pronounciation of her last name, questioning her love of ethnic food, and racial stereotypes drove one to refer to her as a sing
le mother without checking if she actually has any children.
The overriding implication, spearheaded by a majority of older white men, is that we can't trust a Hisanic woman on the court, because she might let being a Hispanic woman influence her decision-making abilities. Furthermore, the big argument that just picking a Hispanic women is a form of Affirmative Action has been fearlessly spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and other unrestrained commentators that have positioned themselves as the unofficial official spokespersons of the Republican Party.
Can you blame me for asking?
So please, if you are reading this, and you happen to be a Republican, let me know. Are you all a bunch of completely out-of-touch cold-hearted bigots? Or am I just reading too much into your party's handling of Sonia Sotomayor nomination. I'm begging you, please lay these concerns to rest. Because the people leading your organization aren't helping.
It started with the Tea Party idiocy. The orchestrated protests, the media coverage, then the media coverage of the lack of media coverage, followed by the lacking media's coverage of the other media's over coverage, culminating in a pointless event overshadowed by the coverage of its own coverage. Not to be outdone, the people behind the whole event were ignorant enough to adopt a commonly known sexual act term as their slogan, and then complained that everyone else kept making fun of them for using it. The more time the cable news channels waste reporting about themselves instead of other noteworthy events, the more I find myself wishing for government sponsored propaganda to pick up the pace a bit. An occasional smoke and mirrors display of manufactured opinions camouflaged as investigative reporting would be a welcome alternative to the constant barrage of narcissistic excuse-making pandering they bombard us with every day.
Since then, its been nonstop torture. Did we torture? Should we have tortured? What is torture? Is torture illegal? Is torture justified? Is torture necessary? Who did we torture? Who tortured? Who told them to torture? Who knew about the torture? Who should have known about the torture? Should we be told about the torture? Listening to the endless stream of former administration officials, legal experts, and military intelligence ad visors debate and dissemble and deconstruct and dissect and define and redefine the very concept of the word has become downright torturous. I could try to be funny here by naming someone I'd like to see water boarded, but I'm afraid that once I start that list, I won't be able to stop.
I'm not even going to begin to list the multiple headaches developing across the wrinkled terrain of my cerebral landscape because of the whole shift of political power from the right to the left. All I will allow myself to say is that there are more damned Republican talking heads, politicians, and political pundits on my television now than there were during the entire Bush presidency. The only thing worse than listening to the Republicans being smug with power is listening to them bitch and moan about being out of power. And the only thing worse than that is listening to the Democrats that are finally in power again bitch and moan every time Obama doesn't act like Bizarro Bush and fulfill their fevered liberal wet dreams.
Of course, in the background during all of this has been the recession, unemployment, government bailouts, the stock market crash, home foreclosures, massive layoffs, massive corporate CEO bonuses, health care, TARP funds, and the slow, steady erosion of any hope we might have had that the people in charge of everything might actually have a clue about how to make it all okay. In fact, the only thing anyone seems willing to agree upon is that everyone else is obviously wrong.
Then, just to add some flavor to the mix, we get a week straight of Miss California and Notre Dame. Some bimbo gets bent out of shape when she becomes unpopular for the first time in her precious little life, then cries about her constitutional rights to religious beliefs and freedom of speech when she is almost stripped of her crown for violating several aspects of her contract. At the same time, a university decides they aren't going to honor Obama with an honorary degree because some religious leaders don't like his position on stem cells and fetuses, then backs down when the rest of the rational world tells them to grow the hell up already. Mix the two together in the same news cycle, and you get a screeching cacophony of gay marriage, abortion rights, moral authority, religious indignation, and the usual Left vs. Right grandstanding as every politician alive attempts to scream the loudest about whatever gets people fired up more. Even Obama saving the day with yet another remarkable speech doesn't help wash the holier-than-thou taste out of my mouth.
And of course, as if things weren't loud and volatile enough, a Supreme Court Judge has take it all one notch higher by suddenly announcing his retirement. Get ready for months of endless nominee challenges, accompanied by yet another exciting round of abortion debates, the definition of which is two sides yelling Baby Killer and Woman Hater at one another until someone gets fed up and calls it a draw.
I know, if you're smart enough to be able to peek behind the curtain and see what truly motivates the talking points and repeated slogans, you should be able to just laugh at it and shrug it off. But you can only laugh so long at the likes of Hannity and Beck, until you suddenly realize that you're laughing way to loud, and so hard that it trails off into uncontrollable fits of coughing. That way, as they say, leads to madness.
Maybe stressed isn't the right word. Distraught strikes closer to home. The more I sit back and watch this freak show of self-righteous goons throw insults and prepackaged witticisms at each other across news desks, their smug shit-eating grins and flippant schoolyard attitudes beating my patience and goodwill like hammer-fisted kidney punches, the more I feel like this is the beginning of the end. Maybe the giant pyramid scheme called Free Trade Capitalism has finally run its course, and the founders of the world's greatest Ponzi Scam are milking the final drops of blood out the rock while the poor saps at the bottom of the labyrinthine structure run around in circles trying to figure out why the wealth isn't trickling down anymore. Maybe this big Pseudo-Democratic experiment was doomed from the start, and it was only a matter of time before we crumbled under the weight of our own lofty ideas on how the world should really work. Or maybe, just maybe, we as a country had spent one evening too many voting on American Idol outcomes and assuming that our best interests were truly being sought after, and we were only just now awakening to the realization that the people we've put in power have been slowly and methodically screwing us into the ground.
When I get in these kinds of moods, the best thing to do is to put in a movie, lose myself in the art form of the story and the direction, and try to forget about everything else.
So, I sat down to a quiet viewing of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
In hindsight, it probably wasn't the wisest choice. But something about it helped. Maybe it was the fact that Peter Seller's portrayal of the President looked an awful lot like a younger, slimmer Dick Chaney. Whatever it was, I found myself beginning to relax a bit. By the time I got to the end, with George C. Scott ranting about not allowing Soviet survivors of nuclear Armageddon to get ahead of American survivors and create a 'Mine Gap', I had found that I had learned to stop worrying. Kubrick's classic black comedy reminded me that this isn't the first time that the world has appeared to be in an unstoppable downward spiral.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we aren't screwed. By all means, just the opposite is true. We are definitely screwed. We're as screwed as we were during the Great Depression, or the Cuban Missile Crisis. We can look back at those historic events and think of them as isolated incidents, giant hurdles that we were able to overcome. The greater truth, however, is that they are perfect examples of exactly how close we are to complete and total self-destruction on any given day. In the Great Depression, the financial masterminds that orchestrated the structure of our entire financial foundation practically destroyed the wealthiest nation in the world overnight. And the Cuban Missile Crisis? A two-bit dictator that our craftiest secret agents couldn't assassinate with an exploding cigar gave us our first palpable taste of Nuclear Armageddon. The farce of Dr. Strangelove has survived for so long that to this day because it is, on a certain level, undeniably accurate. In all likely hood, there is a General Ripper hunkered down in some quite hallway of the Pentagon, silently waiting for the bureaucratic loophole that will allow him to jump start WWIII in a vain attempt to preserve his bodily fluids.
So why am I more relaxed now? Because we can still look back and laugh. The fact that the people we entrust with guiding and protecting us manage to botch the job so massively and often that they make the Three Stooges look competent isn't comforting. But the fact that we survive each cataclysmic event by the skin of our teeth allows us the illusion that our luck will hold out. The illusion of repetition is what allows us to laugh at tragedy. We can laugh at the poor fool who falls through the open manhole cover on the screen, because subconsciously we know that he'll survive the fall, even if only to perform the same tragic event for someone else's amusement. So yes, we are indeed spiralling down that manhole once again. But the odds are that we will somehow manage to miraculously rebound, even if only to perform the same tragic event for someone else's amusement.
And if it this actually does turn out to be the last hurrah for real? In that event, some of us will still be laughing, if not just a bit too loudly. Some of us just can't help it.
Wow, it really hasn't been a good month for hot chicks, has it?
First, Susan Boyle confuses television and youtube viewers by being a talented singer and unattractive at the same time. News and Tabloid outlets (if there is a difference) paraded her around like the Elephant Man and asked a bewildered world how such a thing could occur. Attractive pop singers became the butt of a lot of jokes, mainly about how they were rich and beautiful, but not nearly as talented, and therefore undeserving of the billions of dollars we had spent making them rich and famous. Of course, that meant the joke was on us, so it only took a week or two for everyone to forget Boyle and her unattractive talented self.
Then, Carrie Prejean (pronounce pri-ten-shuhs) came out on the Today show and announced that she would be working with (see: using her pageant title to promote) the National Organization for Marriage. NOM isn't pro-marriage as much as it is anti-gay marraige, and the idea of a Miss Anything hoping on the advertising budget of a group this controversial in nature was enough to garner her all of the Prime-Time news coverage that she didn't want.
The immediate response was from pageant officials. Embarrassed enough to implicate their own phoniness just to smear Miss "Opposite Marriage" California, they openly admitted to paying for her boob job. In typical fashion for people unaware of how phony they are, they released the information to make Prejean look bad, while at the same time remarking how it isn't shocking that they paid for them. The rest of the world was slightly more aware, and therefore unimpressed enough by the duplicity to not care.
Of course, equation of Public Media Sensation + Attractive Model + Attention Starved almost always = Nude Photos, it didn't take long for Carrie's teenage indiscretions to earn front page coverage across the tabloids in the form of a semi-nude photo of her in pink panties.
Faced with being unpopular (a social situation I am sure Blondie McPlatiboobs is completely unfamiliar with), Carrie immediately leapt to her own defense by attempting to redefine her plight as religious persecution, rather than an unfortunate series of Blonde Moments:
"My comments defending traditional marriage have led to intimidation tactics that seek to undermine my reputation and somehow silence me and my beliefs, as if opinion is only a one-way street.
"I am a Christian, and I am a model. Models pose for pictures, including lingerie and swimwear photos. Recently, photos taken of me as a teenager have been released surreptitiously to a tabloid website that openly mocks me for my Christian faith.
"I am not perfect, and I will never claim to be. But these attacks on me and others who speak in defense of traditional marriage are intolerant and offensive. While we may not agree on every issue, we should show respect for others' opinions and not try to silence them through vicious and mean-spirited attacks."
Every time someone tries to use their religion to justify bigoted behavior, they should be slapped. I'm not just suggesting this as a novel concept; I'm proposing that we actually sign it into law. We could call it Carrie's Law.
Let's take two anti-gay marriage individuals. We'll call them Adam and Steve, just to be funny. Adam says he is against gay marriage because he doesn't like gays. All will agree that Adam is simply a bigot. Now Steve is also against gay marriage, but he insists that his opposition is due to the teachings of his religion. Both of these jackasses hold the same views, yet Steve is more likely to get a pass on being called out on his position because of the belief system he subscribes to. If you disapprove of Adam for his views, you are simply repelled by his ignorant opinion. If, however, you oppose Steve's opinion, you are insulting his religion, suppressing his freedom of religion, and attacking the very Creator to which his everlasting soul belongs.
Not exactly a logical argument, is it?
Of course, no one really expects anyone crowned Miss California to be armed with a vast arsenal of logical arguments. I haven't checked, but I seriously doubt it is in the job description. Odds are, no one has ever really had the heart to break the news to her. If possible, someone close to Carrie (relative, handler, PR rep, spiritual guide, nutritionist, stylist, plastic surgeon) should try to get a message through to poor little Carrie.
Carrie, you need to face the truth. People are not mocking you because of your Christian faith. They are mocking you because:
You are, quite simply, stupid. I hate to be mean here, but... on second thought, I don't mind being mean in this case. You're an idiot.
Let's face it; most people just downright hate beauty pageant winners. Honestly, the whole pageant industry has become such a cliche it is almost unbelievable that they still hold them. They should either come right out and combine them into one gigantic Miss Hot Bimbo contest, or scrap the entire concept and just dole the scholarship funds out to the homely students with the good grades and future aspirations that rise beyond advocating literacy and closing puppy mills.
You are using the title bestowed upon you, no matter how ludicrous it might be, to publicize an agenda that isn't exactly part of the pageant's platform. If you had incorporated Anti-Gay Marriage rhetoric into your little beauty contest speeches, maybe people wouldn't have been so shocked in the first place.
Irony. Look it up, then reconsider that you placed yourself in a position in which you condemned others for a lack of Morality, and were then promptly exposed as having broken the Morality Clause of your own contract. Ironic.
You really are an idiot.
Whoever decides to play messenger, please get to her before her next press conference or shameless cable news promotional appearance. I'm not really concerned about her making a bigger ass out of herself; I'm just not sure I want her fifteen minutes in the national spotlight to last longer than Susan Boyle's.
James Herbert has been a solid name in the horror genre ever since the widespread success of his first novel, The Rats, back in 1974. Seven books and eight years later, The Rats was turned into both the film Deadly Eyes (directed by Robert Clouse, the man who gave us Gymkata) featuring dogs dressed up like rats almost as convincingly as the titular carpet-covered canines in The Killer Shrews, and a Commodore 64 video game.
It is a pleasant surprise that the puppet masters behind the World Horror Convention, being held this year in Brighton, have selected James Herbert as the Guest of Honor. Never one to be influenced by his own success, many of Herbert's books strayed from the boundaries expected by horror publishers and readers alike. His fourth book, Fluke(1977), for example, was a decidedly non-horrific tale of a dead man who attempts to reunite with his family after being reincarnated as a dog. Fluke's concept was unceremoniously ripped off by Rod Browning in his screenplay debut, Oh! Heavenly Dog (starring Benji and Chevy Chase), and then faithfully adapted to the big screen fifteen years later.
Two other James Herbert novels were lucky enough (if lucky is the word) to make it to the big screen. The Survivor, his third book and first foray into the supernatural, became the first Australian film with a budget exceeding $1 million, and the last film to star Joseph Cotton. Then, in the mid-eighties, Herbert turned an unused BBC screenplay into the novel Haunted, which was then adapted into a screenplay for the mid-nineties film by the same name.
Since the fluke that was Fluke, James Herbert has never been afraid to mix it up a bit. Dancing back and forth between apocalyptic horror stories and almost storybook tales of the supernatural, James Herbert has always dared to go wherever the muse takes him, no matter what the accepted definitions of his chosen genre might be.
Some hardcore horror fans will complain that Herbert had forsaken horror for fantasy early in his career by not delivering the minimum amounts of sex and violence demanded by the blood thirsty horror genre devotees. But what the WHC has recognized is that deviating from the norm is what keeps things fresh and inventive.
There are so many horror authors out there who are happy enough to simply crank out novel after novel of the same format, until one is barely distinguishable from the others. I'm not going to name names. Okay, maybe I'll mention Bentley Little. The point is real artists define the genre they work in, not the other way around, and James Herbert has more than made his own way. Hell, any horror author willing to turn a human-possessed squirrel into a reoccurring character in later novels is a force to be reckoned with.
This past Friday, Obama interrupted Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' daily song-and-dance routine to give a brief statement about Supreme Court Justice Souter's retirement announcement. In the increasingly emotionally charged bipolar shouting match that broadcast politics has become, the changing of the Supreme Court's roster is the gunshot that starts off a month-long marathon of bitter debates, biased bickering, and a sharp increase in income for cable news "Expert Guest Correspondents". The quicker the White House tackles the subject, the quicker the hysteria can spread and deplete its own energy like a tuckered out toddler at the tail end of a sugar rush. Apparently deciding to bypass the trouble of calling a separate press conference to address the issue, Obama just strolled up behind the podium, nudged Gibbs aside, and gave the press corps some quotes and responses to chew on for the next twelve hours.
Obama's impromptu press conference shouldn't be such a big deal. You would think our elected leader crashing his press secretary's spiel, chuckling and swaggering onstage and casually tossing jokes around would be something we could take in stride. (That's right, I said "swagger". I'm not a highly paid CNN news correspondent, so I figure I can get away with it.) It was, for lack of a better word, Cool. Why should we expect the "Leader of the Free World" to be anything but Cool?
Of course, we're not used to Cool. After eight years of watching our President playing Cowboys and Indians both on and off the public stage, we've forgotten what it feels like to actually feel good about something as simple as a spur of the moment press conference. It almost feels unnatural to watch our President give a press conference and not cringe at least once or twice, hoping in vain that the rest of the world didn't notice that last sentence. To be fair, Clinton wasn't even that cool. He tried to be, did his best to come off as cool by going on MTV and playing the saxophone. But in the end he was only cool be default; like the high school English teacher that occasionally curses and plays the guitar on Fridays, he got points for at least trying, or even knowing how to go about trying.
Maybe that's why a lot of Democrats are so hard on Obama when he doesn't toe the line on every left-wing movement that's suffered through to terns of Bush cronyism. The left still has its roots firmly planted in the hippie-movement and counter-culture of an era that defined cool, that the newly elected savior of the cause has to be more to them than they can reasonably expect him to be. It just isn't enough for them that he is cool; they need him to be super cool, capitalized, in all caps, with a few exclamation points thrown in for effect.
Obama's biggest enemy is the nature of the beast he struggled so hard to saddle and tame. It's a beast that has grown far too big and powerful to be broken; it is all that most can do just to hang on for dear life until the next general election. But we tend to ignore this when Obama plays the game that we voted him into. We so desperately need him to be our Super Cool Savior, that watching him tip-toe around politically volatile topics like the possibility of criminally prosecuting Bush's tag team of warmongering policy writers for war crimes. Those thirsty for the blood of those who made public surveillance and torture the new apple pie of America's legend can practically taste it. They are so righteously vengeful that they grow more and more frustrated every time Obama effectively cock-blocks their attempts to do to the same thing to the Bush Administration that it spent eight years doing to civil rights and the Geneva Convention.
Obama's right, of course; he knows that going full-tilt against Bush and the Neo-Cons would be portrayed as biased witch hunt. He's got to play the game and slip that kind of thing under the radar. We're so used to policy-makers hiding behind the Oval Office, we've forgotten that the door swings both ways. But the hard left is so drunk with newly-regained power that it hasn't been able to play along. Obama's literally too cool for the room; his subtle signals for everyone to play it cool while he mixes things up behind the scenes are going unnoticed, mainly because we can't get past the hurt of watching him perform the same verbal tap-dance that we thought we were finally putting behind us.
We need to wise up to a simple truth. You can't change the nature of the beast. Politics in the new age is nothing more than a non-stop infomercial, no matter which side is selling what. You don't get into office by rejecting the system; you get in by mastering the game and making it work for you. Of course, admitting this is the same as admitting that we are nothing but easily-led consumers in almost every aspect of our lives. But it's true. A woefully short public memory can be the only excuse as to why Democrats have forgotten that their last man of the hour was the perfect example of the American Political Salesman.
For all intents and purposes, Clinton was the Joe Isuzu of the white house. So likeable and charismatic in that glossy salesman sort of way, most Americans were willing to give him a pass even when it was blatantly obvious that he was talking out of his ass. The conservative hardcore loved calling him "Slick Willy", a demeaning nickname that sounded nifty, but was never that realistic. There was nothing slick about Clinton's "I never inhaled" answer, his "I never had sex with that woman" statement, or his pitiful "definition of 'is'" argument. Clinton had a habit of fumbling under pressure, like most bullshit artists that don't quite know how to switch gears when someone finally pulls back the curtain.
The Slick Willy moniker was just wishful thinking on the right wing's part, a sad attempt to explain away why he managed to get away with so much and still hang on to a high approval rating. They'd rather claim that American voters were mesmerized by the forked tongue of a skilled illusionist then face the truth. They tried to explain Obama's popularity the same way during the 2008 elections, bluntly accusing him of hypnotizing the American public. But popularity is the beginning and end of it, the sad reality behind Republican claims of devious wordsmiths and mass hypnosis. People just liked Clinton; so much so that cheating on his wife didn't put a major dent in his approval ratings.
It might be rather insulting to claim that American politics boils down to nothing more than popularity contest. I, for one, think we deserve the insult. Not for falling for the cult of personality; it's human nature to do so, and you can't fault a scorpion for having a stinger in the first place, let alone using it. We deserve the insult because we can't bear to admit that it is true. We bitch and moan about politicians and the news media constantly lying to us, then turn around and flat-out refuse to be honest with ourselves. We lie to ourselves and claim advanced knowledge of government policy and global diplomacy, or hide behind hot-button topics like abortions, guns, or gay marriage.
But the dirty truth we can't seem to cop to is that the majority of voters simply go with the party or candidate that makes us feel better. We voted for Clinton because he had a way of making us feel good about things, even when things weren't good, and then gave him a second term when things actually were good. Bush (debatably) won by the skin of his teeth twice, first because he was the kind of guy we'd like to have a beer with, and then because we were too afraid not too.
And Obama? Deep down inside, we know the real reason he beat out grumpy old man McCain, even beyond the Palin Debacle; it's been way too long since we've had a cool President. As luck would have it, our new Cool Pres might also have a clue as well. The real question is, can stop playing Potsie to his Fonzie long enough for him to set things right?
I have a nasty habit of discovering excellent series in the middle. Very seldom am I lucky enough to read a novel with characters and situations that I thoroughly enjoy, and then later discover that they have been carried over into new novels. Instead, what often happens is that I find out a book I liked is from the middle (or sometimes end) of an excellent series, and I am forced to backtrack and collect the previous books.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=32d4e741-efe4-4033-a88d-0194f5787fe9)
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