thus spake zogby

ZOGBY!

@$#*%$&*!!!

what are you reading this for? GO VOTE!

me, i’m alternately gobbling up exit polls, tearing the whites of my nails off with my teeth (eww, ester, in the office?) and eating other people’s halloween candy. everyone’s acting like kids today. have you noticed? people are giddy, high-strung, pouty …

& people keep asking me if i’m all right. of course i’m not all right! GO VOTE!

as mama orders

my father is fine. they released him from the hospital today and he didn’t even have to have surgery. diet, exercise, blah blah blah … the point is, he’s not in danger. thank god.

so my mom’s on her way to ohio. ben just departed for there. amazingly, the flyers they’ll be handing out, as they protect the rights of inner city voters everywhere, were designed by my oldest friend liz. it’s like a reunion!, only, duh, minus me. i’ll be here in new york, praying hard, and citing the example of sodom.

this was my basis for telling claire that i was relatively sure everything would be okay. if god wants bush to win, it’s because he’s ready for the world to end; and by his own mandate, he won’t end the world if there are 10 good people to be found. the source for this is the famous story of sodom. god wanted to destroy sodom, a town known for its wickedness. abraham pleaded with god to save the city for the sake of its well-meaning inhabitants.

how many are there?, asked god.

50?, replied abraham.

nope, said god.

er, 40?

nope, said god.

25?

abraham worked god down to ten. when it was established that fewer than 10 good people lived in the town, abraham stopped fighting and let god wipe it out. so 10 is clearly the ceiling! and there MUST be 10 good people in the whole world. at least 5 good friends of mine should qualify.

by the way, the handful of “good people” who did live in sodom got a warning to leave before Hurricane Char-ley hit. one of these people offered his 2 virgin daughters to an angry mob, one of them got mired in regret and was turned into a pillar of salt, and two of them conspired to trick and sleep with their father. makes you wonder what the wicked were like.

best of luck to all of you out doing noble work tomorrow, trying to keep the world from crashing in on our heads. let’s hope we get a better result than we got 4 years ago.

the redskins lose! the redskins lose!

the redskins, washington dc’s offensively-monikered and and offensively-mediocre football team, in their last game before the election have an eerie knack for predicting the outcome of that election. so you know what this means?

no, not that lisa doesn’t love homer. of course she does! daddy-daughter day, yay!

no, it means that THE INCUMBENT WILL BE OUSTED. so says decades upon decades of american tradition. in fact, i’m hoping in light of the strength this omen, republicans across the country will fold their hands and realize the immense pointlessness of voting at all. kinda like the cardinals should have done instead of attempting to take on the sox.

by the way, there’s a obscure reference to a movie in this entry. see if you can spot it.

the secret ingredient is salt

since i lack the time & money to take an actual vacation, for the forseeable future i will be doing the next best thing: burying myself in fantasy literature. already i’ve finished book 11 in the series of unfortunate events. now i’m gearing up for my hike through johnathan strange and mr. norrell. it’s been called harry potter for the out of diapers set!

in consequence i will not be paying any further attention to this circus of an election. i will restrain myself from making comments such as, “everyone said as an october surprise they’d produce bin laden. the best they can do is produce a stupid TAPE? it’s not even a scary tape! where are the zombies? he says blood in the streets but there’s no blood dripping from the corners of his mouth. even dick cheney has blood dripping. next time they should hire kate duffy and do it right.”

they even timed the damn thing badly. hello karl: a significant portion of the populace has already voted. of course, as planned, those populaces prolly came home from casting their ballots only to watch the evening news and slap their foreheads: “damn! i should have voted for bush! he can make villains appear on TV at will! what can kerry make? cheese?” well, too late, suckers. you can only vote once (or twice in new mexico).

and those who hadn’t already cast their ballots were busy pre-partying for halloween weekend. really, i think the republicans are too stupid to win the election this time. sorry karl. it should have been a landslide and you fucked it up.

… all of that, see, is an example of the talk you won’t hear from me, as i use my eyes solely for the purpose of pleasure reading. i’m as happy as you are.

worn out

the red sox won the series; my friend nomi is 1 for 1 for acceptances in md/phd programs so far; john kerry is slowly but surely moving up according to slate’s newest figures; and i had a good day. one of my actors brought me a brownie. she told me it’d be a surprise, but as she’s a jew and i’m a jew, food is kind of a “duh.” still, much appreciated.

yet.

my dad’s not well. this country’s not well. i’m exhausted from caring so much. activisty-ness doesn’t come naturally to me, thanks to a hardened combination of skepticism and laziness. so i’m not sure getting my hands dirty in philly this weekend will help. it won’t help my posture: i’m so stressed i’m carrying my shoulders up around my ears. how nixonian of me.

this country reelected nixon! this country interred the japanese! this country sat by and let joseph mccarthy operate without anethesia on the body politic, yanking out and tossing, with my elementary skool science teacher’s abandon, various inalienable rights. america does not do outrage easily. it’s the downside of being so darned optomistic. so will we have the sense to oust this blusterer, this bungler, this mangler of the english language? will we? or will our dim complacency and fear carry the day?

i think i need a cool room with padded walls and an ocean view. and please god, for real, i need my father to be okay.

continuing on a theme …

since the eminem video (link below) bridges the gap between politics and culture, i will use it as a segue to venture further into culture, if only to help myself calm down a bit. the news this morning had me nearly hyperventilating at my desk. (being at the plugged-and-diapered time o’ the month, i suppose, doesn’t help.)

please god, if you haven’t abandoned us, see us safely through this election. give us the president we deserve and may we endeavor to deserve him, or at least hold off taking him for granted until february 05. please god, don’t write america off as a lost cause. if you won’t, i won’t.

but i was going to talk about culture.

i got four books today from the nypl, bless their souls, including the latest from lemony snicket, bless HIS soul, and my aren’t we religious today. well, you know what they say about foxholes, and boy are we as a country in a deep one. (CULTURE.) okay! lemony snicket. i can’t say enough about this mournful, mordant writer of children’s books and mag fields songs. he will see me through the next week, or at least the next underutilized evening.

this evening won’t be underutilized though. crank up the khakis and get me a rifle: i’m going goose hunting for undecideds. yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaw. (CULTURE!)

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE! that’s what i wanted to talk about, since i finally kicked my own ass and ben’s into a movie theater. but even the free popcorn that came with our nyu-discounted tickets couldn’t make this disappointment go down easy. such potential, so much intelligence and anger and humor, so many puppets, and ultimately, what do you have? an action movie that mocks action movie conventions. that’s at its most successful level.

politically, TAWP’s message is muddled. since ours is the viewpoint of the arrogantly casual TAWP agents who shrug off their world-altering fuck ups, we the audience sympathize with them. with the opposition aiding the terrorists, there isn’t much choice. besides, TAWP is well-intentioned, so who cares if the louvre is destroyed? (except for da vinci code fans everywhere, who gasped a collective “my god! the grail!”) as ben pointed out, the louvre is just a symbol, as is everything in the movie, up to and including our puppet pro- and antagonists. unlike in the far more effective southpark movie, no character here has any real personality.

again, for a send-up of action movies, that’s fine. but it makes for weak satire. even if you’re aiming only for a perfect parody, why leave the requisite happy ending intact? why not go for something actually memorable and stranglove-ian? why finish up with a logically-unsound at best and offensive-and-misogynistic at worst finale diatribe on how the world is divided up into dicks, pussies, and assholes, with clear preference given to the dicks? i mean, ew.

there is a whiff of a critique to begin with of TAWP’s god-given right — actually, god isn’t mentioned anywhere; patriotism is their religion, so it’s more like flag-given — to destroy the world for the sake of saving america. but by the time michael moore shows up, two fisting hot dogs, as a suicide bomber, it’s clear the filmmakers have run out of nuanced or original things to say. half the celebrities they kill off seem seriously unnecessary. their rancor against sammy l. jackson, danny glover, & helen hunt is bewildering. the prominent leftiest i can understand, since they’ve put themselves up on a soapbox to be knocked down. but susan sarandon is not exactly sean penn.

the homophobia and the racism didn’t bother me as much, for whatever reason. at this point, that’s expected. but some originality and consistent, killer humor would have been nice to balance them out. the nail in the coffin is that the consistent, killer humor was lacking.

messrs. parker and stone should go back to making smart cartoons and leave political satire to john stuart leibowitz.

no exaggeration

holy shit people, i’m not kidding, eminem just made me cry.

“four more years of george bush would be like four more years of syphilis”

bwah! oh, to publish an article like this. those fearless folks at rolling stone. who knew they had political interest? some of my favorite thompson bits:

i’ve heard this story a thousand times, but it always cracks me up:

Back in 1948, during his first race for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon Johnson was running about ten points behind, with only nine days to go. He was sunk in despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children.

His campaign manager was shocked. “We can’t say that, Lyndon,” he supposedly said. “You know it’s not true.”

“Of course it’s not true!” Johnson barked at him. “But let’s make the bastard deny it!”

Johnson — a Democrat, like Bill Clinton — won that election by fewer than a hundred votes, and after that he was home free. He went on to rule Texas and the U.S. Senate for twenty years and to be the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States. Until now.

then there’s:

…things are not much different today. We still love War.

George Bush certainly does. In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you’re not. Love it or leave it.

and

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man’s-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.

–RICHARD M. NIXON, “REAL PEACE” (1983)

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a “liberal” candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today — and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected “American people”) don’t rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for — but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.

oh mercy. just go read the whole article.

slouching towards bethlehem

since hitting my saturation point at 3 pm yesterday, have i recovered my appetite for devouring all news political, poll-tical and otherwise?

no.

however, i have continued to mull on a yeats verse i saw on the B train, the most eerie and prescient poem anyone has ever written about this election. and yeats is dead! here tis:

turning and turning in the widening gyre/

the falcon cannot hear the falconner

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, and the worst

are full of passionate intensity.

does that send a shiver up your spine or what? even creepier, i copied it down onto the back of a card urging me to renew a magazine subscription. i got home and told ben only to discover his father had done the exact same thing. different magazine, probably, though.