Saturday, December 30, 2006
Dead air
Cable news networks' ratings boom during wartime (surely one of the reasons there weren't that many hard questions asked at CNN et al in the buildup to the Iraq invasion) and small wonder: death doesn't pause for commercial announcements, chaos needs to be witnessed live. Blink and you'll miss the end of someone's life.
State funerals, on the other hand, are like watching black paint dry and show up the shallowness of the newscasters more than scripted programs. (It's hard to ad lib when you have nothing on your mind but your hair.) Gerald Ford may have wanted a simpler send-off than the one Reagan received (it's hard to imagine one more spectacularly pompous) but that won't stop cable news from treating it like a
Leni Riefenstahl spectacle. By going through his old home of Alexandria and pausing at the House chamber, Ford probably hoped to keep it real, remind folks that he really was a man of the people -- not a phony one, like the 43rd but an authentically ordinary guy.
Nothing ordinary about James Brown and his own funeral tour -- the Apollo Theater yesterday,
Augusta GA today -- was meant to evoke his own remarkable life. When Ford died they could only think of one great quote from him -- "Our long national nightmare is over" -- while James dispensed more wisdom than the Tao: "Money won't change you but time will knock you out," he sang and who can forget the immortal words of "Superbad": "Sometimes I feel so nice I wanna jump back and kiss myself."
Too bad you couldn't have seen your funeral, JB! When your widow got done singing "Hold On, I'm Coming" you would have thought she was going to jump in the casket with you. Michael Jackson was there, looking pretty dead himself, and the house band entertained the mourners with a redition of "Sex Machine" (you think they're gonna play that at my funeral?). If Ford were to get into heaven he'd do it unostentiously, slipping in the side door. Al Sharpton asked St. Peter to "open the gates of heaven wide because James Brown likes a lot of room to swagger."
Get on the good foot.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
He is risen
As if confused by the holidays, the Jesus of Wyckoff Street has rolled away the stone -- or opened the glass door -- to leave his phone booth sized home. The life-sized plaster statue of Christ crucified that for many years adorned the block of Wyckoff between Smith and Court streets has flown the coop, along with the owners of the brownstone He stood before.
There goes the neighborhood.
That was my old neighborhood and back in the day the long-suffering savior was a reminder that you were not in Manhattan anymore. Like the battle of the Christmas lights that occurred on First Place each holiday season, or the mobbed-up restaurant Marco Polo, the Wyckoff Jesus was a real slice of Italian Catholic whaddya-whaddya Brooklyn. When He went, He took some of Cobble Hill's character with him.
There had been other signs of the Apocalypse in downtown Brooklyn of late; the pizza place at the corner of Warren got menus and booths and started charging $2 for a slice, and before that the Musician's General Store went out of business clearing the way for another Starbucks, presumably.
Another former Hill dweller told me that the folks who owned the Jesus house finally sold out (no doubt pocketing a cool mil or more) and gave the Son of God the send off He deserved. A little parade escorted Christ to one of the nearby Catholic churches, one that has not been converted into apartments, where He will dwell forever and ever, amen.
Long after Heath and Michelle have moved on...
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
The secret door
This morning our president received the much-anticipated Baker report on Iraq and declared it interesting. "It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals, and we will take every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion," he declared of the much-anticipated bipartisan group-think product called
"The Way Forward", which sounds more like a forgotten Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford vehicle than a serious peace plan but that could be because Bush isn't serious about peace. "I'm a war president," he has insisted since 9.11 and his remarks constitute such a classic don't-call-us-we'll-call-you blow-off that it's hard to imagine any of the gentlemen on the committee waiting by the phone.
Much has already been made in the press of how much (or little) GWB would make of the Baker proposal, given his Oedipal relationship to Dad and all the Realists (fightin' words to neocons) who served him. If there is one central image of our president that sums up his foreign policy it may be that of him
trying to open a ceremonial door after leaving a stage in China last year. He made a comic face, probably not unlike the one he would make when the keg ran dry back at Yale,
He still thinks there is a secret door out of Iraq and that if he turns the handle we can exit -- gracefully, even. Unfortunately he thinks the door is the same one he came in through when he got this party started. (Not the Grand Old Party; he ground that one to a halt.) Drunk on the fruit of his own nectar -- "Come on everybody! Try some democracy! I'm driving!" -- he is starting to realize no one else wants to boogie with him and it's making him surly. In the words of Joe Walsh, "It's hard to leave when you can't find the door."
Maybe saying one picture sums up this failed administration is unfair -- there are so many to choose from. Some people still like
"Mission: Accomplished" while a minority dig the
box-on-the-back debate picture. (When in doubt, blame the tailor.) I'm starting to warm to a mental image, one conjured by Donald Rumsfeld's
eleventh hour memo, in which he says the Iraqis have to "pull up their socks."
Aren't you glad he left before one of his subordinates had to inform him that the men in Iraq don't wear socks?
