Lance Mannion

Jack Crabb gets "buffaloed" by Wyatt Earp

The skinny fellow walked quickly back to me and staring coldly from under his straight black eyebrows says: "You have an objection?"

I allowed I did not, but I also requested he state a reason why in the goddamn hell he thought I did.

"You just spoke my name," he says.

"I don't know your name," says I.

"It," he says, "is Earp."

"Oh," I says, laughing, "What I did was belch."

He knocked me down.

Well, sir, I arose directly with my gun in my hand, but Earp strode away, giving me the choice of ventilating his back or agreeing with him that the incident was closed.  But damn if I was going to let him set the terms, so I throws some spectacular abuse at him in front of them other hunters, and he turns and comes back.

"Draw, you goddamn Belch you," says I, for in that measured stride he had come within ten feet of me and his weapon was still holstered, his hands swinging freely as he walked.  But onward he come, and I found it impossible to raise my gun and shoot him down until he went for his, but he never.  Finally, having reached a range of one foot, he detained my right wrist with his wiry fingers of his left hand, drew his pistol, and struck me over the head with its heavy barrel.  I was cold-cocked for fair.

This was the technique called "buffaloing," and it was Wyatt Earp's favorite when he became a marshal later on.  In all his violent life, he only killed two or three men, but he buffaloed several thousand.  I guess he was the meanest man I ever come across. In a similar circumstance, Wild Bill would have killed his opponent.  Not Earp, he was too mean.  To draw on you meant he considered you a worthy antagonist; but he didn't; he thought most other people was too inferior to kill, so he would just crack their skulls.  I don't know how it worked, but when he looked at you as if you was garbage, you might not have agreed with him, but you had sufficient doubt to stay your gun hand a minute, and by then he had cold-cocked you.

---from Little Big Man by Thomas Berger.

Hour of the Gun

Plodding shouldn't be a complimentary way to describe a movie, but offhand I can't think of a better word for the pacing of John Sturges' revenge Western, Hour of the Gun, starring James Garner as Wyatt Earp and Jason Robards as Doc Holliday.

It's as if Sturges set the beat to Wyatt's first, slow, measured steps out into the streets of Tombstone and towards the O.K. Corral, in the opening shots of the film.  The pacing from there on, never speeding up, never slowing down, matches Earp's inexorable march towards vengeance and his final showdown with the man who ordered his brother's death.

That's deceptive.

Wyatt's path to that last gunfight takes him all over the map.  It moves in fits and starts.  There are times when he isn't chasing the bad guys at all, he's off on some other, mundane, or at least non-violent, errand, like taking Doc, who's dying of tuberculosis, to a sanitarium in Colorado, hundreds of miles away from Tombstone, so far off that it might as well be another planet.  Definitely far enough away---and he spends several weeks there, looking after Doc---that you begin to wonder if he's given up his vendetta.

But Sturges hasn't paced the movie to keep in step with Wyatt's geographic travels.  He's matching the progress of Wyatt's thoughts as Earp changes from a decent-hearted and dutiful lawman into a lawless but cold and methodical killer.

This progress is only seemingly inexorable.  The measured pacing, the one foot in front of the other, one step following from the last scene structure---no jump cuts in this movie.  Few close-ups too.  Sturges shoots mainly in medium and medium long shots and lets the characters' movements provide all the action, and since Garner is in just about every shot, he sets the pace, slow and steady.  Too steady.  Inhumanly steady.  Scarily steady.---what we're being shown is that this change in Earp is not inevitable.  One thing does lead to the other, but predictably, and because it's happening slowly, he has time to think about what he's done, where he's headed, what the final results will be.

He could stop himself at any time.

Like I said, there are times when he seems to have stopped; in the scenes in Colorado Wyatt even comes close to looking cheerful, as if he's let it go.  But the measured beat of Sturges' drum is relentless.  In his mind, Wyatt's never given up the hunt.

It doesn't help that Clanton can't give up his obsession with Earp any more than Earp can give up his obsession with Clanton.  Clanton wants to see Earp "cold and in the ground" and just at the moment when Wyatt seems ready to listen to the angel of his better nature, he gets news of Clanton's plottings.

He doesn't have to do anything about the news, though.  He just decides that he will.

He gets back on the trail.  The killings continue, each one more violent and more unnecessary and more like murder.

There's not much suspense in the plot.  The suspense arises from the place suspense arises in all tragedies---from our hope that something will stop the inevitable in its course and our despairing certainty that nothing will.

Hour of the Gun isn't a true tragedy, though.  For one thing, we know going in that Wyatt Earp can't die.  Not if the movie is going to be as historically accurate as the title card after the opening credits proclaims it will be.

This movie is based on fact: This is the way it happened.

And for another thing, neither Sturges nor his screenwriter, Edward Anhalt, do much to make us care about what happens to the men Earp goes gunning for.  They are bad men and their boss, Ike Clanton, is worse.

What Sturges expects us to care about, and to mourn, is a good man throwing away his own soul.

Hour of the Gun has been called a sequel to the movie Sturges made about Wyatt Earp ten years before, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, starring Burt Lancaster as Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday.

Sequel's the wrong word.  Hour of the Gun is the Wyatt Earp movie Sturges would have liked to have made in the 1950s.  The Jimmy Stewart-Anthony Mann problem westerns had already shown that movie audiences were ready for morally ambiguous stories with conflicted, if not downright unsympathetic, heroes, but apparently the Wyatt Earp legends were still untouchable.  Sturges did what he could to make Gunfight at the O.K. Corral a more realistic story and not another burnishing of the myth, but it is finally an old-fashined shoot-em-up, set in a romanticized Wild West with an idealized Wyatt Earp as its hero.

Hour of the Gun isn't a revisionist western.  Sturges isn't out to debunk the myth he had helped shine.  He's really trying to show what the title card says:  This is the way it happened.

By 1881, when the Earps confronted the Clanton gang at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone wasn't in the Wild West, it was at the very westernmost edge of the tame East.  And Wyatt Earp and his brothers weren't heroes riding in to town to clean up.  They were peace officers---cops---hired by the town to maintain an orderliness that was already established.   In his bulkiness and stolidity, James Garner's Earp is a little bit like John Wayne.  But he's more like the guy who's running for sheriff in your town today, a career lawman who's spent too many nights breaking up fights between drunks and picking up the pieces after an accident and arguing with local politicians about budgets.

Hour of the Gun opens with the shootout at the OK Corral and it's staged fairly close to "the way it happened."  It's over in a couple of minutes.  I think the real gunfight took about thirty seconds.  That's because it wasn't meant to be a showdown.  It was four cops going to tell a street gang to break it up.  The fact that three men ended up dead was enough of a suprise to everybody concerned and seen as something so heinously out of the ordinary that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were actually arrested for murder, although a judge decided there was no case against them and refused to indict.

That's the "wild" west of Hour of the Gun.  Showdowns are not a part of daily life and dead bodies in the street are a sign that something went wrong, not that the good guys have put things to right.

You don't need to have seen Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to know what's going on in Hour of the Gun.  What you do need is enough of a sense of the legend of Wyatt Earp to accept Earp as a hero at first sight.  You also need enough innocence to believe that the legend must have some basis in fact to carry you past any reflexive cynicism that might stand in the way of your seeing Earp as a good guy.

It might help, then, to know that the real Wyatt Earp apparently never killed anybody before the the O.K. Corral.  He was a crack shot and could have killed any bad guy he felt needed killing.  But his preferred method for dealing with troublemakers was to walk right up to them, snatch whatever weapon they were brandishing out of their hands, cold-cock them over the head with his pistol, and drag them off to jail.

This appears to have worked for the real Seth Bullock of Deadwood fame too.

The real Earp didn't look like James Garner or Burt Lancaster.  He was tall, but he was skinny.  So it wasn't his size that cowed people.  There was something about the force of his character.

Whatever it was that kept him alive and saved him the trouble of having to kill anybody didn't work with the Clanton gang.  Gang is the word for them too.  They were more like modern gangsters than like the outlaw gangs of the movies or the real life James and Dalton gangs.  They were cattle thieves and stick-up artists who ran "legitimate businesses" and bought up local politicians and while some revisionist histories suggest that the gunfight at the OK Corral was actually the result of business and political rivalries getting out of hand, with the Earps being in their way as dirty as the Clantons, it's more the case that the Earps shocked the Clantons by deciding to treat them like the criminals they were instead of the honest ranchers they pretended to be.

The shock caused Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers to draw their guns---or have their guns drawn, that's never been clear.  We don't really know if the Earps knew they were walking into a gunfight and went anyway.  The way they just walked straight at the Clantons suggests they didn't, and Ike Clanton may not have been wearing his guns, which would mean he wasn't expecting real trouble either.

The famous shootout was probably a mistake.  Both sides miscalculated.  What happened in the weeks after, though, was murder.  Ike Clanton or somebody associated with the gang ordered a hit on the Earps.  Morgan and Virgil were ambushed.  Morgan was killed and Virgil left crippled.

Then various members of the Clanton gang began turning up dead.

My second favorite Wyatt Earp movie, 1993's Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer as Wyatt and Doc, treats this part of the story as a simple kill or be killed shoot out that takes place over the course of weeks instead of all at once at high noon.

My favorite Wyatt Earp movie is My Darling Clementine, but that's one of John Ford's fairy tales.

Sturges, though, makes it plain that Wyatt Earp does not have to kill any of the men he confronts.  He's a much better lawman than they are outlaws and gunfighters.  He has the drop on them and the ones who make the mistake of drawing on him do it because he provokes them to.

In every confrontation, except the final one, Earp's former method of handling bad guys---stare them down, take their guns, drag them off to jail---would have worked.

In effect then, Earp murders them all.

Each killing seems less accidental than the last, and with each one Earp grows less and less surprised at himself.  When he lets a bad guy live it's only to make him tell him where the next bad guy is hiding out so he can go kill him.

This is the story of a good man who does wrong, but Sturges doesn't ever let us think that Earp has no choice.  Wyatt knows that the citizens of Tombstone have been working, successfully, to run Ike Clanton out of town and have effectively disarmed him by breaking up the gang, arresting and buying off those members Earp hasn't caught up with yet.

On top of which, Sturges makes us doubt Wyatt from the start.  The opening gunfight is shot almost entirely in longshot and although there's some dialogue we don't hear the words, as if we're being kept out of earshot with the camera.  We don't know what the Earps are thinking as they walk down the street or what the Clantons are really planning when they gather at the corral.

But Sturges has James Garner give Earp a moment of pause in which he seems to be re-thinking the situation and even telling himself that this probably isn't the way to go about things and he ought to stop it right now.  It's only a moment, but before it passes Garner suddenly looks very sad, as if he has lost something important and is mourning the loss.

And while Sturges' title card insists "This is the way it happened," he's changed an important detail.

In real life, Ike Clanton was with his brother and the McLaurys.  The reason he didn't end up dead like them is that when the shooting started he ran at the Earps shouting that he was unarmed---he might have thrown his guns away, he might have dropped them when Virgil Earp ordered the gang to disarm, or he might not have been wearing them to begin with.  Whichever was the case, Wyatt Earp shouted at him to get the hell out of the way and even gave him a helpful shove.

In the movie, Sturges has Ike standing across the street with the rest of the gang and then ducking for cover as soon as the shooting starts.  He's wearing his gunbelt, but he takes it off before the smoke clears so that he'll appear to have been an innocent bystander.

He doesn't owe his life to Wyatt then.  He owes it to his trigger-happy kid brother Billy and the McLaurys who started shooting too soon.  The Earps have to deal with them first and while they are shooting it out with Billy and the McLaurys, the rest of the gang scatters and Ike is forced to take cover.

The implication is that Ike meant to be part of the confrontation and that the Earps expected him to be.  And since Ike is played by Robert Ryan and is the only star among the Clantons---although Jon Voight appears in one of his earliest roles as Curly Bill Brocius---Ike is the only Clanton of interest at that point.  So we can't help feeling it was Ike the Earps were on their way to...

...do what to?

Arrest?  Argue with?  Interrogate?

Kill.

That's what I think Garner's little moment of hesitation and sorrow is meant to tell us.  As the movie begins, Wyatt Earp has already decided that he's going to kill Ike Clanton.  He's concluded that there's no other way to deal with him.  The decision is morally wrong because it's wrong for practical reasons.  The town has already begun to make moves to get rid of Ike.  Clanton himself is desperate because, as he tells his bought politicians later, "The East is coming."  He means that the town's honest citizens will finally have the backing of real government and he won't be able to survive that.

Wyatt certainly knows the East is coming too.  But he's lost patience.  Perhaps it's also a matter of pride with him.  He's going to put a stop to Clanton himself, once and for all, and that means he has to kill him.  The thing he's mourning the loss of in that moment, then, is himself.

We're not meant to think that Wyatt is driven to murder by passion and an understandable desire for revenge.  When Clanton has his brothers ambushed it gives him justification not motivation for a course of action he's already decided upon.

Hour of the Gun is a director's not an actor's movie.  There's not much in the way of dialogue.  The characters tell each other what they they need to know, never what they are thinking or feeling.  Garner isn't called upon to do much more than glower and then glower harder.  Robert Ryan's job is to give Ike Clanton the charisma and intelligence necessary to organize, lead, and hold together a collection of thugs, cowards, sociopaths, drifters, and grifters.  It's interesting and fun to see him make Clanton into a precursor of Deadwood's Al Swearengen.  In his speeches to his gang about the threat from the East he sounds very much like Swearengen ranting about Yankton, without the profanity of course and without the poetry either, but he has exactly the same contempt for his bought politicians as Ian McShane has Swearengen show towards the corrupt "decent" citizens that are his allies.

All the real heavylifting is left to Jason Robards.  He only has a couple of notes to sing, going back and forth between world-weary cynic and outraged idealist, but he doesn't go the usual route of having the cynic be the mask of the idealist.  He makes the idealist the creation of the cynic.

As I said, you don't need to believe the myth as much as remember it to accept the movie's premise that Wyatt Earp is a good man.  But it's clear that Robards' Doc Holliday not only believes the myth but needs it to be true to the point that he drags himself out of the hospital in order to try to get in the way of Earp's self-propelled downfall.  If there's killing to be done, Doc Holliday is the one to do it not Wyatt Earp.

Holliday sees himself as having been a bad man, and not just a sinner but a villain.  Somehow and for reasons neither man can probably articulate Wyatt Earp became his friend.  Holliday has concluded that if someone like Wyatt Earp can see something good in him then maybe he's not as irredeemble as he'd supposed.

Wyatt Earp is Doc Holliday's personal savior and now that Doc knows that he can't fight off his TB any longer, that it's going to take much more time to kill him, he desperately needs Wyatt to be what he thought him to be so that he can die thinking of himself as not entirely damned.

I like it that the dialogue doesn't lay this out for us.  We have to see it for ourselves in Robards' anger and anguish at what Wyatt is doing to himself.

The nicest thing about Robards' performance, though, is the calmness that comes over him when he realizes that it didn't matter that he couldn't stop Wyatt.

It's Robards, not Garner, Sturges gives the last scene and the last lines to.

Before leaving him at the sanitarium, knowing that this is the last time, it's the end of the line for Doc, Wyatt has told Doc a lie about himself, a charitable lie, meant to leave Doc with his illusions about Wyatt's heroism.  Doc pretends to believe it, but he doesn't and there's a heartbroken look on Robards' face as he watches Wyatt ride away.

But it doesn't last.  He turns his attention to a card game he's playing with an orderly and finishes the game and the movie with a rueful but sincere grin.

"Aces," he says as he lays out his winning hand.  It's a description of his mood as well as of his cards.

In Wyatt Earp, Sturges is showing us that the seeds of our moral self-destruction are in our own hands.

But in Doc Holliday he is showing us that the corrollary is true too.  The agent of our redemption is our own self.

When nice things happen to bad bloggers

Speaking of vanity, and I was, in the post below this one.

A nice thing has happened.  Lance Mannion has been nominated for an international blogging award, The Best of the Blogs.

Lance Mannion, by the way, is the name of this blog as well as this blogger's nom de web, and it's the blog that's up for the award, not me.  Lance Mannion's nominated in the Best Weblog English category.

Hot damn!

I don't know who nominated LM but thank you very much.

This is a juried award, and a quick look at the judges will snap you out of any delusion that blogging is something done by people of little or no accomplishment in their pajamas obsessed with American politics.  Not that you ever thought that.  But Michael Kinsley might be reading, though I doubt it, since his latest anti-blogger screed proves he doesn't even read the most important of the big liberal blogs, let alone this one.  Nevermind.

Although you can't vote in the strictest sense, the judges are looking for input.  So, if you are a regular reader, I'd appreciate it if you'd click over and give your input here.

Once you've checked the box---which is Best Weblog English.  I know, I know.  But I didn't nominate me.---poke around their web site.   It's very interesting to see what's going on outside of our little corner of cyberspace.

Thanks again to all my readers.  You're swell!

More kindling for the bonfire of the Vanities

It's kind of a given that politicians have gigantic egos.

Givens are not always truths.

I don't think it's the case that it's their egos we're talking about when we see someone like Jeanine Pirro, the Republican candidate for Attorney General here in New York, self-destruct in a public display of hubris, anger, vindictiveness, and a complete contempt for the laws that as the one-time Westchester County district attorney she'd sworn to uphold.

I say public but Pirro didn't mean to have an audience of more than one.  She goofed when she tried to enlist Bernie Kerik in her plans to spy on her philandering husband.  She didn't know that Kerik's own habits of ignoring inconvenient laws had attracted the attention of the Feds who had his phone bugged.

Excerpts from the transcript show Pirro afflicted by a severe case of the It's all about ME's!, which, by the way, I think is understandable for a person whose spouse has been humiliating her with a series of adulteries and, not incidentally, risking her political career through his self-indulgence.

Of course, Pirro isn't an ordinary betrayed wife.  She's a public figure with not just an image to maintain but responsibilities, to her party, to her staff, to her constituents, to the State of New York.  Her feelings are natural and we can all sympathize with her anger and her pain, but she has a duty to keep a lid on them.  It's her job not to let her personal life take control of her public life.

So you could say that in trying to drag Kerik into this---and, although I don't feel the least bit sorry for him, he has enough problems of his his own; she's supposed to be his friend---she let her ego get in the way of her good judgment.

But I think ego's the wrong word.

The right word is vanity.

Ego can be partly defined as one's self-regard, and so can vanity, but that doesn't do justice to either word.  Ego isn't self-love as much as it's self-respect.   Our ego doesn't just include our sense of who we are, it includes the kind of person we are striving to be.  It includes our determination to get there and the discipline to accomplish it.  It is that part of us that exercises self-control.

The ego stands a bit aloof, objectively watching our lives unfold, stepping in to hold things together, or put them back together, when the other, weaker parts of our nature explode and tear our psyches apart.

Vanity is that part of us that tells us we are the most important person in the world, the part that is always asking in a demanding whine, What about MY needs?

Ego is that part of us that says that the kind of person we are matters more than what happens to us.  Ego is the part that says, This is not worth making a fool of ourselves over.

A strong ego can make a person arrogant, but it never makes them act silly.

Whether you're a politician, a movie star, a business executive, a famous artist, a blogger with a reputation even, being in the public eye, having power over events or just over a few other people's opinions, having celebrity, having too much money or too much access to other people's money, being flattered all the time, being in any way the sun around which other people's planets revolve, this is all warping.  It pulls a person's sense of self all out of shape.

Vanity is that part of you that loves the new you, that thinks, You're worth it, babe.

Ego says, No, this is me, and resists all the tugging and pulling by other people.

Politicians ought to have strong egos.  What too many of them have is an out of control sense of self-worth.  They are vain.

From Pirro to Joe Lieberman to George Bush, and back through time to Lyndon Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and on to Aaron Burr and even poor John Adams, the country has had to put up with the outsized Vanity of too many politicians, great and small, while we've lucked out by the appearance of a few politicians with titanic egos---Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt.

All this has not much to do with anything, and although it's her own fault that we know all about it, Pirro's soap operatic private life shouldn't be an issue in the election.

Her willingness to use the influence she has as a public figure to serve her own personal needs, however, is a reason to vote against her.

Still, I am mainly interested in this story as a story and Pirro's character as the basis for a character.

This would be the basis for a good if a little trashy movie or an episode of Law and Order or...

...another short story that I should be writing.

Which reminds me.  It's almost time for the next installment of the Lance Mannion Tall Tale of the Month Club.  Watch your mailboxes early next week.

Meanwhile, there's still time to get this month's short story, A Penance for Tom Mallory, if you're interested in stories about politicians and their vanities.

We are Americans

Torturers are cowards and sadists.

Americans are not cowards and sadists.

Torture doesn't work. 

Amercians are not stupid.  We don't use tools that don't do the job.  We don't pursue courses of action that take us nowhere.  We do not persist in doing what we know is wrong and futile because we are too stubborn or dumb to think of anything else to do.

Torture is against all our principles.

Americans are people who sacrifice their lives for their beliefs.  We aren't yellowbellied lily-livered chickenhearted scardy cats who throw away all we believe in just because we are afraid for our own skins.

Torture, rendition, secret military tribunals, great big holes poked in the Constitution, whimsical suspensions of haebeus corpus---these are not things Americans do.  They are things done by a feckless and reckless President who can't think of any way to solve any problem except to make it worse.

Americans do not blindly follow any President, we do not give any President whatever powers he demands, not even the best Presidents, let alone one who ignored a serious terrorist threat and allowed the worst mass murder in our history to take place, who used that tragedy as an excuse to lie us into an unnecessary war that he then proceeded to lose, and who cannot under any circumstances bring himself to admit a mistake or make a move to correct himself.

We are not sheep.  We are not cowards.  We are not a nation of unprincipled thugs and sadists.

Spread the word.

Write your Congressmen.  Write your Senators.  Write your local newspaper.

Tell them.

We are Americans.

"Live from New York, it's...aw, who gives a hoot?"

Thinking about the Saturday Night Live-like show we so far haven't seen much of on the show that's supposed to be about producing said Saturday Night Live-like show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has me wondering.

Just how funny was Saturday Night Live?

Was it ever truly funny?

Is it funny now?

For all it has mattered to me, SNL might as well have gone off the air when Dan Aykroyd left.  I watched it on and off over the years, including the benighted early 80s shows, the Lost Years followed by the Eddie Murphy Show featuring Joe Piscopo.

Do the names Charles Rocket, Robin Duke, Denny Dillon, Mary Gross, and Brad Hall make your heart sing?   The only reason I remember Julia Louis-Dreyfus from that time is that just as I was forgetting who she was she turned up on Seinfeld and I was shocked that she had not only grown a lot prettier but had learned how to be actually funny.

But I think I've seen maybe four episodes since Will Farrell moved on.  The last one was a year or so ago, and all the skits seemed to be about how stupid and ugly people can be.  One of the skits, Appalachian Emergency Room, was actually about laughing at the cripples and retards.

In the old days a skit like that would have been condemned to the last half hour when the cast was too coked up to remember their lines anymore and the only audience left watching on TV were those of us too desperately lonely to go to bed or whose roommates still had the sock hanging from the doorknob.

There was a kind of train-wreck fascination keeping you glued to the screen.  The joke wasn't in what was happening on the screen but in wondering what the idea must have sounded like when they came up with it and at what point they stopped bothering to write any of it down, figuring that Belushi would save it by improvising or going nuts or both.

Except by that point Belushi was usually comatose.

I've often wondered how many of the skits done in the last half hour were back-ups, if at around 12:15 Lorne Michaels began looking around to see who was still coherent.

"Shit.  Ok, we'll save the Killer Bees for next week, again.  What do we got that that Jane and Gilda can do?  Oh hello, Garrett, what's on your mind?  Can whatever it is wait?"

But Applachian ER came in the first half of the show, I'm pretty sure before Weekend Update, since I was only watching to see who they had anchoring the news.  Prime real estate, in other words.

Tell me that was while Tina Fey was off making Mean Girls.

Still, the old show had its share of clunkers in the first half hour.  Not surprising, really, when you consider that the first and most critical audience a joke or a sketch has to make laugh is the other writers and when you read about the smorgasbord of drugs being sampled backstage, even if as much as half the shit was going into Belushi, you have to think it must have been pretty easy for the writers to crack each other up.

But how much of what we thought was funny was funny?

Saturday Night Live has always had an easy audience.  It comes on about the time its target demographic is staggering back to the dorm or the apartment, stoned or half-drunk, with their morale flagging.  Everybody's realizing, "Ok, there are no good parties, we're not going to get laid, and, what the fuck, Sergei's delivers, might as well turn on the tube."

People are looking for something, anything, to cheer them up and send them to bed thinking the night's not been a total waste.

You're just ready to meet the Coneheads, Gumby, the Church Lady, Wayne and Garth, the ambigously gay duo half way.

More than half way.

Was it funny or were we just too ready to laugh?  I loved the original cast but did they ever do anything more than provide us all with a set of catchphrases we could use to sound funny to ourselves later and employ as code words at parties to identify ourselves to each other as would-be hipsters?

We are two wild and crazy guys.

Vito, you're blocking.

Let us consume mass quantities.

Good evening, I'm Lance Mannion and you're not.

Jane, you ignorant slut.

Nevermind.

And there was just something reassuring, almost magically healing, in knowing, when you were home alone, or at least not with the girl or the friends you wanted to be with, again, on a Saturday night, that at that very moment, live, in New York, there was this gang of really cool, truly funny, mildly dangerous people having a ball for your benefit.

There was Steve Martin!  There was George Carlin!  There were the Stones, Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstdat!  There was Fran Tarkenton, for crying out loud!  And you were on the same planet as they were, alive in the same moment, sharing a joke, thinking the same thoughts, enjoying the music together.

Damn, it was fun.  In a totally and, later on, depressingly vicarious way.

But was it funny?

Sometimes I don't see how it could have been, because those people were not good at focusing on their jobs.

It's part of their own self-legend that putting on a live comedy show week in and week out was brutally difficult, it was amazing to them, and ought to be amazing to us, that they managed to fill the first half hour with anything, let alone all the brilliant stuff they did fill it with---think what it was like then to have to fill 90 minutes.

Of course, like I said, they didn't fill 90 minutes, those last 30, often the last 45, were almost always a waste.  But still.  What they did verged on the heroic, didn't it?

They were heroes and heroines in the service of Comedy.

Except that Milton Berle and Sid Caesar did the same thing, and they had to do it close to 40 times a year.

And the turn-around on sitcoms that film before live audiences is pretty quick. 

Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Selma Diamond---they expended as much energy every week as Michael O'Donohue and his writers, but they didn't expend it getting in their own way. Belushi and Aykroyd and the rest may have worked as hard as Sid Caesar, but a lot of what was work for them was just holding themselves enough together to make it through the week until 1:00 AM Sunday morning.

Yes, it's amazing Lorne Michaels had a whole 90 minutes of show to point cameras at every week, but considering the uncontrolled self-destructive and self-indulgent impulses of the cast and the writers it's amazing that any work got done at all.

If some of that work turned out to be funny it must have been a miracle.

How miraculous was SNL?

It's still the highest compliment that can be paid to any succeeding incarnation of SNL that it's as funny or funnier than the glory days.  I've heard people say that under Tina Fey the show was better than it ever was.  I wasn't as devoted a fan, but I thought the Phil Hartman-Dana Carvey-Jan Hooks-Mike Myers era produced more consistently funny episodes, and, by the way, Kevin Nealon is one of the most under-rated of all the SNL alum and I'm glad to see he's having a good time on Weeds.

Going back to watch old episodes wouldn't help me make up my mind.  If I laugh, I won't know if it's nostalgia or my funny bone at work.  If I don't laugh, that doesn't mean anything because so much of the show's humor was topical and I've probably forgotten many of the topics.  Dan Aykroyd's Jimmy Carter struck me as brilliant and The Pepsi Syndrome was one of my favorite skits of all time, but how much of the effect depended on Jimmy Carter being in the White House at the moment and The China Syndrome in the movie theaters?

I want to believe it was funny.  I want to believe I was smart, hip, cool, and funny because I liked it.

But there are too many doubts.

It's always something.
_____________________________________________

Questions it would be more fun to contemplate if you're 20:  Is SNL funny now?  What's funny?  Who's funniest?  Who's doing Bush?  Who was the best President anyway---Aykroyd's Carter?  Aykroyd's Nixon?  Phil Hartman's Reagan?  Dana Carvey's George Herbert Walker Bush? Phil Hartman's Clinton?  ("You gonna eat those fries?")  Will Farrell's Dubya?  Darrell Hammond's anybody doesn't count.  It's unfair competition.  Hammond's a god.

Blogging Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Welcome Wolcott Readers!  I've got kind of follow-up to this post up today, "Live from New York, it's...aw, who gives a hoot?"

Updated as show progressed.  Wrap-up added below on Tuesday morning.

Opening.  This is a show about a comedy show, right?  I counted 16 lines that were meant to sound like jokes.  I counted one joke.

Does this mean that this is a drama about writing a comedy show?

Pretty girl with full lips who played the Pinkerton/Governess on Deadwood to skinny girl:  I wish my body looked like yours.

Skinny girl: I wish my talent looked like yours.

Is the Pinkerton/Governess talented enough to carry the burden of that line? 

Josh Lyman or whoever he is:  You raised the bar a little high.

Amanda Peet: I raised the bar a little high?

Chandler or whoever he is:  A little high, yeah.

Amanda Peet:  Clear it.

We're meant to take that seriously?  That's a sign of her faith in them, her high standards, what the business requires?  Bad sports metaphors?

Seconds after first commercial break bloggers get dissed.

"Bernadette is writing in her pajamas surrounded by cats."

We get dissed with a five year old joke.

Aaron Sorkin has been in suspended animation since he left West Wing.  Given their ages, half the "cast" and many of the writers would have their own blogs and websites.  A character who went around insulting bloggers and being dismissive of the Internet would be picking fights with his co-workers.

Benefit of the doubt:  Maybe that's supposed to be a part of D.L. Hughley's character.

I am not in my pajamas.  I am not surrounded by cats.  I am the cat's pajamas.

No, I am the walrus.

The cat's in the cradle with a silver spoon, the little boy laughed with the man in the moon.

Love triangle.  Governess/Pinkerton still carrying torch for Chandler.  Sexy chick in black tank top is sleeping with him.  This is news to Governess/Pinkerton.  They played this straight.

Sexy chick might be skinny chick from earlier.  Can't tell.  All the brunettes in the "cast" and among the writers look and dress alike.

Back from second commercial break.  Governess/Pinkerton is showing a lot of cleavage for a supposedly uptight Christian type.  Not that I'm complaining.

Chandler and Governess/Pinkerton have had the first of what I'm afraid will be a weekly event:  The big scene in which they come close to kissing!

Twenty six more lines that sound like they were meant to be jokes.

I did like it that Chandler's afraid that Phil Donohue can beat him up.

"Seriously, he's a big Irish man."

What's Charlotte's husband from Sex in the City doing in the writers' room?  He must be important because he's Charlotte's husband from Sex in the City but he hasn't said anything yet that explains why he's important.  Somebody explain please?

Christians are on the march against the show.  Terre Haute won't air it if the Crazy Christian sketch is included.  Amanda Peet stands up for her guys.  Was there ever a doubt?

Steven Weber's afraid for his job?  Who's his boss?

Aaron Sorkin remembers when Steve Martin returned to Saturday Night Live and promised to restore the show to former glory in a big song and dance number.  Inspiring rock music rising on the soundtrack as Chandler sits down at his laptop and starts to create tells us that he will write something as funny and brilliant as Steve Martin did.  Fade to commericial.

Ok.  Hard to go wrong with a Gilbert and Sullivan parody.

Steve Martin's song and dance number was funnier and they moved through the studio.

Is the whole point of Governess/Pinkerton's character to prove that gosh darn it some Christians are nice folks and like to laugh just like we godless liberals?

I think I'm going to like Steven Weber's network exec best.

Are we ever going to get to see the Crazy Christians sketch?

Do you think someone will tell Aaron Sorkin that the reason it was fun to watch the writers at work on the old Dick Van Dyke show was that they were funny?  Their lines were written by comedy writers!  Buddy Sorel was played by a comedy writer!

Rethinking the Gilbert and Sullivan parody.  It was a song full of inside jokes about a phony comedy show that's the subject of a TV drama full of inside jokes about television.   Sorkin made up an inside and then made jokes that were only funny if you were inside the inside of the inside.  Is that hip or what?

What.

Wrap-up:  I'm going to give Studio 60 a couple more chances.  West Wing made me grumpy like this for the first few episodes---and there were things about it that I never stopped being grumpy about---but I was glad I stuck with it.  I stuck with West Wing for Martin Sheen and Rob Lowe. I'm sticking with Studio 60 for Steven Weber and Matt Perry, who so far, seems to be the only character on the show who understands that comedy is harder than dying.

I hope the can't live with you/can't live without you business between Perry and Sarah Paulson starts being played for more laughs.  It's probably Perry's ranginess and the fact that he's playing a comedy writer, but I couldn't help being reminded of Dick Van Dyke and that got me thinking, What if Rob and Laura had met later, after Rob was successful?  Laura was an awfully conventional girl, even for the time period.  Imagine her having to compete for Rob's attention with actresses, writers, etc. after he had gotten used to dating actresses, writers, etc.  Paulson's character is apparently a bit in the same boat, because of her religion and her conservativism.  She doesn't really fit in Perry's world, and her challenge is to make him see how he might fit and be happy in hers.

But if it's true that her character is based on Kristin Chenoweth, then I wish they'd cast a Kristin Chenoweth type.  Paulson is willowy and fragile, she doesn't just wear her heart on her sleeve, she is one long exposed vibrating nerve.  How can Perry not see how much she loves him?  How can he let her be hurt like that?  Chenoweth, who looks like a cartoon character brought to life, is tough, brassy, and a bit abrasive.  If they had "her" in the part, you could see how the other characters might forget that she had feelings they had to be considerate of.  You could also see how Perry's character might forget that she's pretty and sexy.  She'd have the problem of reminding him she's a girl, as attractive in her way as all the willowy bulemic brunettes around, while also making sure he knows she's off limits until the ring's on her finger.

Plus, Chenoweth is funny.  She's a born comic and entertainer.  As played by Paulson, the character's just a leading lady who can deliver a funny line, not even a Mary Tyler Moore, who was a comedienne trapped inside the body of an ingenue. 

The show is going to pale really fast if they don't start showing "the show."  A sketch a week.  Plus, the writers' room has to be funny.  No more talking about jokes and sketches.  The writers have to tell them and act them out.  Like West Wing, Studio 60 is a show about doing the job.  But if we don't see the job getting done, it'll be a show about pretty people bragging about what great jobs they have.  If the work they do is so all-fired important that we're supposed to sit still for an hour every week watching them do it, then we should see what makes it important---the comedy.

I wish I'd seen the first episode.  Shakes loved it!

But at The House Next Door, Todd VanDerWerf's feelings about it are summed up by his post's subtile:  The quick wit and false heart of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Comedy writer and director Ken Levine has a blog.  He wasn't impressed with the first episode, either.  He was impressed by his experience working with Mary Tyler Moore, once upon a time, but not in a good way.

This, however, was nice to know about Ted Danson.  But I'm not surprised.

One more update:  Jaquandor, a Sorkin fan, but a level-headed fan, watched the first and second episodes and liked the first but was left a little cold by the second.  He sums up his feelings thus:

Folks, if ever a TV show is going to make my head explode, Studio 60 is going to be the one. I love watching it, basking in Aaron Sorkin's wordplay and noting his ever-apparent mastery of the four-act structure. But at the same time, man, does it piss me off.

There are no bad presidents, only bad ways to describe the bad jobs bad presidents are doing

Updated below, Monday, 6:30 PM.

Feeling all angst-y and depressed because you suspect you may be living through the worst Presidency in living memory?

Lighten up your mood with some simple semantic exercises that can be done right at your desk with no intellectual heavy lifting.

Don't say to yourself, Bush let an American city drown and people suffer and die while he went off to play air guitar.

Instead say:  He exhibited a "distressingly delayed response to Hurricane Katrina."

Don't say: He's shredding the Constitution to give himself the power to spy on all of us at his whim and pleasure.

Say:  He's trying "an experiment in warrantless wiretapping."

Don't say:  His minions blew the cover of an important CIA agent, endangering her, her operatives, and the nation, just to take political revenge on her husband for not backing up their lies and if only Scooter Libby goes to jail for this then there is no such thing as Justice anymore.

Say: The administration has been embarrassed by "a modest string of indictments."

And whatever you do, definitely do not say:  Bush lied us into an unnecessary war that had no other purpose but aggrandizing his own ego, wrecked a nation in the process, killed thousands of American soliders and tens of thousands of Iraqis, and now he has no plan to avoid losing that war except to either hand it over to his successor to deal with or reduce it to a comma by starting a larger war with Iran.

Say:  He's engaged in "a nation-building project so distant from its original intent that our troops are now caught in a proto-civil war."

Try those out.

Good job.

Now, try stringing them together like this:

Since the president’s re-election, loathers of George W. Bush have had no shortage of cudgels with which to club him: a distressingly belated response to Hurricane Katrina; an experiment in warrantless wiretapping; a modest parade of indictments; a nation-building project so distant from its original intent that our troops are now caught in a proto-civil war. One can certainly understand how these developments — and Bush’s correspondingly rotten approval ratings — have emboldened the opposition. The problem is that these developments have also made the president’s critics more susceptible to rhetorical excess, and Bush, like his predecessor, already has an impressive gift for bringing out the yawping worst in those who disagree with him. Otherwise reasonable people go slightly berserk on the subject of his motives; on the subject of his morality, the hinged fall off their door frames and even the stable become unglued. This is both an aesthetic problem and a substantive one. Substantively, it means gerrymandering evidence so that inconvenient facts don’t make it onto the map. And aesthetically, it means speaking in a compromising and not wholly credible tone.

Don't you feel better?  Don't you feel reasonable, moderate, bipartisan even?  Don't you feel wholly credible?  Don't you feel much less like a nasty old Bush-basher and more like the kind of Beltway Media Insider the New York Times would hire to write reviews of books by Sidney Blumenthal and Lewis Lapham that you can dismiss out of hand not because the authors wrote anything untrue but because how they wrote about Bush just sounds so mean and angry?

Digby, as usual, got there first, and has dealt with the intellectual dishonesty and breathtaking fatheadness of Jennifer Senior's review in Sunday's Times Book Review of Blumenthal's How Bush Rules and Lapham's Pretensions to Empire

What's boggling my mind is the continued failure of supposedly top-knotch journalists to face up to a serious question.

What if George W. Bush really is a bad President?

I don't mean bad as in Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter bad.  They simply couldn't get the job done.

The Insiders don't seem to want to consider this possibility either, but I mean bad as in Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson bad---truly destructive bad.

Facing the question seriously doesn't have to mean answering, Yes, Bush is that bad.  It means looking at what the man has done in office and assessing his successes and failures, his agenda's benefits and harms.

But they don't even do that.  They don't even try to defend the guy.

They don't even try to argue that Bush-bashing Liberals, Moderates, and, increasingly, real Conservatives have no basis for their criticisms.  It's not that they don't think that from the point of view of the loyal opposition---that is, from the stand point of two thirds of the country now---Bush isn't doing things he should be doing or is doing some things he shouldn't.

They don't treat him as though he was Ronald Reagan.

They treat him as a non-entity.

They don't make any objective attempt to defend him.  They just object to the tone of the criticism.

Tone is everything, donchew know?

Employ the wrong tone, old sport, and you totally refute your own arguments.

As if to cry Fire! when your house is burning down instead of calmly calling 911 and saying to the operator, "I say, I'm sorry to be a bother, but I have a situation here that might require the attention of the chaps at the fire department, if they're not too busy at the moment?  Thankyew" means that you're exaggerating the danger and all your well-mannered neighbors are within their rights to ignore your rude screams for help.

To discuss politics as if it's nothing more than a debate in which adopting the accepted, "reasonable" tone is the all-in-all, is to treat it as if there is never anything to get excited about, passionate about, angry about.  As if, in fact, there is nothing that truly matters.

The case has been made that the Beltway Media Insiders see things in exactly this way.  To them Politics is simply what you talk about over drinks.

There is no point in getting mad at Bush because he doesn't matter.  He might as well not exist, except as a means of career and social advancement.

Read Eric Boehlert's Lapdogs for the case as it stands now.  Read Joan Didion's Political Fictions to see how the attitude flourished as far back as 1988.

But then there is the Paul Krugman's Pretty Story theory.

It's hard for an old codger like me, born as I was during the second Cleveland administration, to come to grips with it, but there are middle-aged people walking around who have no real memories of Richard Nixon.

If you are 40 today, you were 8 when Nixon resigned.

If you are under 40, or 45 even, and working as a journalist in Washington you have an excuse for not feeling in your gut the sense that you've seen this before---a lost war, an out of control executive, a paranoid President publicly demonstrating the depths of his self-delusion---although you are not excused from knowing all about it.

A proper grounding in history, particularly recent history, ought to be as much a requirement for a political journalist as basic anatomy is for nurses and doctors.

There's more to know about Nixon's Presidency than that he won re-election by a landslide against an anti-war Liberal in 1972.

But among the Media Elites there are many Baby Boomers and not a few members of the Boomers' parents' generation---who not only have personal memories of bad Presidents but know what good ones look like.

The ranks of editors and producers and bureau chiefs are dominated by Boomers.

They knew Nixon.  They knew Johnson.

They know that the United States has suffered through two destructive Presidencies in a row.  They know that we are not immune to what all the other nations of the world have had to deal with frequently throughout their history---idiots and villains, psychotics and psychopaths in the highest offices.

So there's nothing in our history that makes suggesting that any President is a bad President inherently unreasonable.

It's only unreasonable if your evidence is unreasonable.  To call Bill Clinton a bad President because you think he ordered a hit on Vince Foster is not the same as calling George Bush a bad President because he ordered a hit on Iraq.

But, apparently, in the Broderesque mind of the Media Elites, to even ask the question, Is George Bush a bad President, is a sign you are coming unglued, that you have let loose the "yawping worst" in yourself.

To go on to give evidence and then talk as if you care that the country is being bankrupted, that we've lost a war we should never have fought, that all kinds of rights we've taken for granted are under threat from the President and the Right Wing authoritarian judges he's packing the courts with, that New Orleans is still a disaster area, that the terrorist threat is growing, that if Bush isn't the worst President in memory, he's making an awful good run at the title, is to prove you are foaming at the mouth mad.

Crazier and meaner than the Right Wing demogogues because at least they're funny, ha ha.

But I think Krugman's got their number.

It's not that they think the question's crazy.  It's that they're afraid that the answer is Yes.

Besides the fact that having to cover the Bush Administration as if it is what the evidence says it is would put a crimp in their social lives, the Media Insiders are convinced that the American people have to be lied to about this.

We can't handle the truth, about Bush, about the American system---we can't be told that Bush stole the 2000 election, we can't be told that votes were stolen all over the place in 2004, we can't be told that the coming election may be hijacked, only that there are some "problems" and possibilities for abuse, and this is a big concession, and risky, so let's be careful to blame renegades and zealots on both sides and honest mistakes all around and not suggest that the system itself is designed to be corrupt.

We can't be told that the war is lost, let alone that it was a criminal mistake.  The nation building exercise just didn't pan out.  Darn those Muslims and their anti-democratic attitudes.

We cannot be told that the United States has a government of human beings, by human beings, for human beings, which means that like the human beings it's of, by, and for it's at best flawed and in all likelihood seriously screwed-up.

America elects only good, decent, honest men to the Presidency.  America does this in only good, decent, and honest ways.  And we do this because we are all good, decent, and honest people.

America is a shining city on a hill.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

Hat tips to the Heretik, Atrios, Greg Sargent, and the Carpetbagger Report.

Update:  Eric Boehlert at the Huffington Post:  "You know there's something deeply dishonest about a book review when it ignores the entire premise of the book in question."

Scott Lemieux, however, no fan of Lewis Lapham's writing, thinks that at least the parts of Senior's review dealing with Pretensions to Empire are "pretty much right."

If I were Jamie Wyeth I'd have painted this...

...Instead I had to settle for taking its picture.  Abandoned barn, Walden, NY.  September 23, 2004.

Apples and classical music on a crisp fall day in the Hoosier State

Life in Indiana wasn't all one soul-shattering moment after another for Young Man Mannion.  Seventeen years ago I was having a pretty good weekend.

Saturday. September 23.  Wind this morning riding the birds on the feeder like a swing.  Sparrows stayed put on the perches while the feeder swung out 45 degrees.

Tops of some trees are turning.  There are some young honey locusts downtown that have gone butter yellow on one side.  Flowering dogwoods: blade of the leaves blood red, gold glinting at the base.

Apple picking at Ohlweine’s Orchard.  Our first visit in real apple-picking weather.  Much better crop than last year’s when an attack of deer and a late frost took many of the buds and the drought stunted the few apples that came to fruition.  We filled our half-bushel in no time, taking Jonathans, Cortlands, and yellow delicious, leaving no sign that human hands had disturbed the trees, there were so many apples left.

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.

The trees at Ohlweine’s are young and none are so tall that I can’t pick from their highest branches without a ladder, so there are no long two-pointed ladders sticking through the trees at heaven still—It just occurred to me that Frost knew what he was doing when he made apple-picking stand for a lifetime of human toil, since it was that first apple picked that condemned us to earning our bread by the sweat of our brow, ladders always sticking toward heaven but never reaching, never tall enough.  I miss the orchards of upstate New York, the branches of the trees closing overhead.  I can still see a family standing on the roof of their VW minibus to reach the top branches.

It was their Apple Fest and the Ohlweine’s front yard was lined with booths and tables belonging to people selling handicrafts—quilted pillows, hand-painted dolls, wooden toys, crocheted items of all kinds, lots of Christmas decorations, a few Halloween witches and skeletons.  Most of the sellers looked like farmers’ wives and daughters.  One young woman working her booth alone, about 16 but with the solidness and practicality of a 40 year old matron.

We bought a handmade apple crate (half a peck) from a pair of plump sisters.  They had set up an apache camper into which the younger sister and her son retreated for coffee from time to time when they got chilled.  The older sister sat just inside the camper door, hand-stenciling the apple crates, and magazine racks, bookends, mail kitties, and napkin stands, their other wares, with blue bows, red hearts, or red apples with green stems, depending on what the customer ordered.  We asked for apples.  Their brother made the the things they sold.  The younger sister confided that the price of good wood was higher than you’d think; that’s why the solid oak magazine rack cost $16.  Our crate is white pine.  Cost $4.  Fifty cents extra for the stenciling.

This sister has in addition to her teenage son a grown daughter, an architect recently returned from France with a French husband, so she must be in her late 40s at least, possibly in her 50s,but her skin was as smooth and unlined as her daughter’s likely is.  Unusual for someone who has worked on a farm and smokes besides.

Sunday.  September 24.  Frost overnight.

Last night we went to hear the Philharmonic pay Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Brahms’ Second Concerto.  Emanuel Ax was the guest.

Ax is a short, moon-faced man with a mop of steel gray wooly hair.  In his program picture he is smiling broadly and looks like a genial merchant, a prosperous small businessman persuaded to put his mug in the advertising or run for the school board.  On stage he did not smile much and he scuttled out to the conductor’s podium, shook hands briskly with the concert master, and scuttled to the piano, where he sat stopped and looking agitated.  The playing of the orchestra seemed to be worrying him and when he played, his shoulders rolling from side to side, his lips worked constantly and though he was probably counting the beat or even silently singing along, his expression was such that I thought he was muttering curses at the orchestra’s ineptitude or berating himself for clumsy fingering.

Except for the timpanist, the orchestra did not seem to be enjoying themselves either or Ax’s solos.  They did not sit back rapt and smiling as they had when the violinist Nigel Kennedy joined them—probably what I was seeing was the difference between a sonata and a conerto; the musicians had to be alert for their cues last night.  The timpanist enjoyed himself though.  Young, hawk-nosed fella, receding black hair cut short in New Wave fashion.  He leaned over his drums and grinned at Ax with a mixture of joy and fierce competition in his eye, as if he and Ax were in a jazz club, two guys just getting ready to jam.

At the finale, Ax with a very serious expression, like a scientist congratulating his colleagues in a 1930s news reel, stagy, awkward, with exaggerated but sincere formality, pumped the hand of the cellist, obviously impressed, even grateful, for the way he’d played the solo at the beginning of the third movement.

Forgiving Cat Stevens

That creaking old fogey Ned Jingo observes that as he descends into senescence he is becoming less grumpy...about some things.  Music he used to destest, for instance.

The gimpy old codger's missus put a Cat Stevens album on the other day and Ned didn't reach for a shotgun to blast holes in the speakers of the Jingo home theater system.  Instead, he actually listened and came close to enjoying the tunes:

My reaction to her spinning of a Cat Stevens chestnut was fairly typical of my musical mindset these days. Where once Punk-Boy Neddie heard calculation and formula and that stupid and lazy pop mysticism that made the Seventies such an unbearable moment, now I find my cynicism gone, and I simply enjoy his ability to write and execute an evocative melody. Cat had, I'm now free to admit, a way with minor keys -- "Sad Lisa," for example, is nothing short of gorgeous, all that beautiful shifting between between E minor and its relative major G. The song employs archetypal harmonic progressions that wouldn't be out of place in an eighteenth-century Anglican hymn, but that are given new life by the lovely and constantly surprising melody, which is summed up with truly deft simplicity in the harmonic-minor chorus, "Lisa-Lisa, sad Lisa-Lisa." If you want an illustration of the ancient musical principle that minor keys sound "sad" while major keys are "happy," and how a good songwriter uses that fundamental psychoacoustic truism to manipulate his audience's emotions, I'd point you right to "Sad Lisa."

Yes, the last proud rock and roll rebel was feeling quite "forgiving" towards the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens.

Just don't ask him to exhibit the same forgiving spirit towards  Andrew Lloyd Weber and the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Clinton gets crazed

Just a request.

If you've spent time on your blog or in conversation comparing George Bush to a chimpanzee or you post goofy pictures of the guy and invite readers to "caption this photo," please don't complain to me about the way Fox has been promoting its interview with Bill Clinton.

MahaBarbara, though, I'll listen to anytime.  Read The Big Dog Bites.

TBogg too.

Hat tip ThinkProgress where you'll also find this helpful bit of information.

The Temperamental Tick of a Conservative

Adding to the list of Character Types.  Here's one.  The Radical.

Ezra Klein on Barry Goldwater:

Goldwater was as fervently nostalgic for the Gilded Age as anyone to ever stride the American political landscape. Given his penchant for occupying the outermost edge of rightwing thought, Goldwater today probably wouldn't be a principled libertarian (as he often wasn't then), but an aggressive demagogue. It's a fairly good question whether radicalism is always the honest endpoint of an independent thought process, or just as often a personality trait.

My italics. Read Goldwater Nostalgia.

Nice Psychiatrists...

After being humiliated during an appearance on a TV show to help Lilith promote her new book, Good Girls, Bad Boys, Frasier retreats to Cheers, where he sits alone at a table, writing furiously on a legal pad.  Woody and Norm are there to try to help cheer him up.

Woody:  Good show, Dr Crane.

Norm:  Yeah, except they cut to a commercial right before it started getting good, you know?  Right when your wife was about to pants Sammy with her teeth.

Frasier:  I just couldn't believe that group got so excited, there was such idiotic behavior, and all because of Lilith's stupid book.

Norm:  Wait a minute.  I thought you liked Lilith's book.

Frasier:  Oh, I did, till I re-read it with a scientific eye and the impartiality of a fellow empiricist.  Then I decided it's pure crap.

Woody:  Where's Dr Sternin-Crane now?

Frasier:  Oh, probably at home, working on Pure Crap Volume Two.

Woody:  What are you doing, Dr Crane?

Frasier:  Just compiling some notes for a book of my own.

Norm  Oh, now you're not jealous of Lilith here, are you?

(Norm crosses over to Frasier's table and picks up some of Frasier's finished pages to peruse.)

Frasier:  Norm, please.  Give me some credit.  I've been planning to do this for years.

Norm (reading the title page):  "Nice Psychiatrists Who Marry Castrating Shrew Battle-ax Harridan Fishwives."

---from "Severe Crane Damage," Cheers, Season 8.

Lilith unpins her bun and lets her hair down

Sure, Frasier joked about her.  But Lilith was never a castrating shrew battle-ax harridan fishwife.

Not on Cheers, anyway.

When Frasier got his own show, he moved into a parallel universe, one where he had been married to a castrating shrew battle-ax harridan fishwife named Lilith and good riddance to her.

But it was necessary to that show's storyline that the audience didn't keep asking, When are Frasier and Lilith going to get back together?

It was also intrinsic to the show's guiding spirit.  Frasier was one of the most strangely gynophobic sitcoms ever.  Lots of sitcoms have hated women and treated them as the Other and the Enemy.  Frasier's main characters were all terrified of women.

The only good woman was a dead one---literally.  Fraiser's mother---or a version of a boy, Roz, or an impossibly virginal overgrown little girl, Daphne.

Whenever Lilith made an appearance, everybody, including Roz and Daphne, quailed before her like the Munchkins whenever the Wicked Witch broomed in.

Meanwhile, back in the Cheers' universe, the other Lilith was a much more sympathetic character.

Sometimes she could be a bit of a scold, and often she seemed to be one of the types of girlfriends that Matt Groenig classified in a list Velvet Goldmine helpfully posted in the comments on my last Cheers post. Huffy.

"I see nothing humorous in those silly cartoons you keep snickering at."

Also known as: No Fun, Humorless Prig, Cold fish, Chilly Proposition, Iceberg, Snarly

Advantages: Your friends will feel sorry for you

Disadvantages: You will have no friends.

This is how Norm, Cliff, Carla, and the regulars would describe Lilith.  It's how Frasier sometimes sees her himself.  But she's only this way because she can't help disapproving when her smart, decent, reliable, heroic husband acts like a particularly dorky teenage boy, a side of him hanging out with the gang at the bar brings out.

Lilith doesn't like the gang as a gang, but she likes Woody and she likes Norm and trusts his taste as an interior decorator.  She makes friends with both Diane and Rebecca.  And she loves Sam, thinks of him as one of her best friends---he thinks of her this way too---she has him over to her house a lot, and she trusts him to look after Frederick.

She's not humorless, either, although her sense of humor is...um...idiosyncratic?  Zeppo is her favorite Marx Brother.

She is not No Fun.  She and Frasier are always doing things together that they both enjoy.  In fact, whenever they are in the bar together it's usually because they're either on their way out for an evening on the town or on their way home.

And she is anything but a chilly proposition.

Fraiser jokes that she uses sex as part of a system of punishments and rewards, withholding her favors whenever he misbehaves or is disobedient, which, in his jokes, is synonymous with acting adult, male, and independent.  But there's not much in the writing and nothing in Bebe Neuwirth's performance that supports this.

Lilith has a very passionate side---a hot temper and a sex drive always on the boil---and it doesn't take much to bring it to the fore.  She and Frasier got together in an explosion of lusty abandon---their foreplay took place on television!

Not only does she delight in her sexuality, she is even a little vain about it.  When she asks Henri, the caddish French photographer who has followed Kelley home from Paris, to take her portrait, they agree that the picture must be tasteful, serious, and becoming to a professional woman and a wife and mother.  Henri promises those results but:

Henri:  With a hint of smouldering sensuality dancing behind ze eyes.

Lilith:  That goes without saying.

We don't get to see the final photograph, but we can tell from Frasier's reaction---"OH MOMMA!"---that once she got in front of the camera Lilith shed a few inhibitions and some clothes.  They're both driven wild by the sight and Frasier sweeps her up into his arms and carries her out of the bar, heading for home and the bedroom as fast as he can.

Then there's one of my favorite episodes.  Lilith goes on a TV talk show to promote her new book, Good Girls, Bad Boys---the title was her editor's idea; she wanted to call it "A Cross-sectional Study of Control Group Females With a Tendency Towards Self-Destruction Vis-a-vis Damaging Relationships With Members of the Opposite Sex."

As Woody says, "Oh brother!  Not another one of those."

She brings along Frasier and Sam for moral support and the men wind up on stage with her, called up by the hostess as examples of a good boy and a bad boy.

Sam's bad boyness excites the all-female audience to the point that they start demanding an answer to what they consider the most important question:  "What does Sam look like with his shirt off?"

Women in the audience (chanting):  Shirt!  Shirt!  Shirt!  Shirt!

Lilith (to hostess): Now this is the perfect example of what a bad boy like Sam can do to a roomful of good girls like these fine women.  (Her eyes lock on Sam) One can't help but be attracted to his steely glance and the strength therein, to imagine (her gaze grows more intense, her voice slower and hoarser) the warmth of his skin against ours, his arms pinning us down so we can't move.  (She's losing it; Sam sees it and starts looking nervous.) One sees his full lips and imagines what they must feel like (seductive pause) slightly moist,  (another pause) tugging at ours, before long one's feeling a little dizzy, and for God's sake, Sam!  Let the buttons fly!

(Lilith launches herself at Sam's chest and begins tearing at his shirt.)

Definitely not Groenig's Huffy type.

What Lilith is, is the Schoolmarm.

The Schoolmarm is the one who always has to be the grown-up in the room.  She sees herself as setting an example.  The Schoolmarm is always on her best behavior in public.  She has a habit of treating other people around her, especially when they're fooling around, as if they were children, although she tends not to start scolding, but to wait.  She'll wait patiently for everybody to settle down and get back to work.  She judges the importance of situations and experiences by how much of a lesson can be learned from them, and she's very good at finding the lesson even when there doesn't seem to be one to be found.  She knows the value of fun.  She believes in play, but in moderation and only when all your homework is done and the toys and books and crayons are put away.

She seems to prefer to watch others having fun to joining in.

The Schoomarm is one of my gender-specific sounding types that actually is gender specific.

An important quality of the schoolmarm is that she holds herself aloof, her physical self as well as her inner self, but there's a promise implied.  The promise is that later, when the time is right, she will unpin her bun and let her hair down.   Her aloofness is the result of professional expectations.  She has internalized the idea that she must be be a public virgin, an ideal of chastity.

Since that's not expected of men, even men who are actually teachers, men can't be schoolmarms.  The closest type for them to this is the Parish Priest.

Other types related to the Schoolmarm but that can be male or female are the Professor, the Den Mother, the Scoutmaster, the Headmistress/Headmaster, the Mother Superior, and the Coach.

On Cheers, Coach was not a Coach type.

An important difference between all of them and the Schoolmarm is sex appeal.

The Schoomarm withholds the possibility of erotic and romantic adventures.  She can't withhold possibitlities that are in fact impossibilities, therefore the Schoolmarm is usually relatively young, attractive, marriageable, and sexually desirable.  She knows it too, but dresses to downplay or hide the fact.

The Schoolmarm as a type is a subset of the archetype of the Ingenue.  Schoolmarms make themselves available as love interests, but their availability is subtly suggested and they must be wooed and won in the proper way.

This is a type that it is possible to age out of.  When she grows older, or when she becomes too obviously a wife and a mother, she turns into a less complicated type, the Schoolteacher.

On Cheers, Lilith becomes a wife and a mother, but she doesn't show those aspects of herself around the bar often or show them at all, we can be sure, when she is at work.  In fact, habit seems to prevent her from showing those sides of herself to Fraiser often enough that when she unpins the bun and lets her hair down it's always a surprise and delight to him...and to her.

Frankly, I'm personally drawn to Schoolmarm types, but I prefer ones who aren't quite as in control of themselves all the time as Lilith is.

I like the ones who are of the psychological type---as opposed to character type, which is what I've been describing in these posts; I've used personality and temperament to refer to psychological type, but all three terms refer to an individual's inner make-up, while character type describes their outward behavior---the Good Girl With a Naughty Streak.

There are Good Boys With Naughty Streaks.

Frasier wants to be one of these, but he can't manage it.

Frasier (upset that Rebecca has called him a good boy and compared him to a favorite pair of comfortable slippers): You think I can't be dangerous?  Is that it?  You think I'm just an old slipper?  Well?  Am I a good boy?  Would a good boy do this?  (He picks up a pair of scissors and begins running around the bar.)  I am running with scissors!  (After two laps, he heads to the door and stops.)  I'm going swimming right after lunch.  I'm leaving now.  I'm going outside.  I'm going to pet strange dogs no matter where they've been.  Look out, World!  Fraiser Crane's going to raise some hell...

(He leaves.  Cliff comes through the door just after he goes.)

Cliff (calling back up the stairs to Fraiser):  Hey, pet him if you want to Fraiser, but you don't know where he's been.

Lilith takes delight in being what she thinks of as wild and impetuous, but she doesn't have enough of a naughty streak to be able to imagine being truly naughty either.

Diane is more of the good girl with a naughty streak.  She's also something a schoolmarm type herself, come to think of it.  Explains a lot.

A variation of the good girl/good boy with a naughty streak is the good girl/good boy with a rebellious streak.

Again, these are personalities not character types.  They are people at odds with themselves.  The job they've chosen, the role they play, the responsibilites they've accepted, have required them to repress important parts of themselves or sacrifice a little too much of their own needs and desires.

Often, they've taken on tasks and responsibilities they're not cut out for, consequently they either hate what they're doing or they aren't any good at it or both.

Which brings us to the subject of the next post in this series.

Rebecca.
______________________________________

Feel free to keep adding to our ever growing list of types.  To get to the comment thread on A typical English professor spouts off click here.

Better twelve innocent men get tortured than that one terrorist escape to do the world the terrible evil of making me afraid

Corrected by Shakespeare's Sister, Thursday, 1:30 PM.

After recounting the story of Maher Arar, the Candadian computer engineer who was kidnapped and handed over to the Syrians to torture for 10 months, Glenn Greenwald (via Shakes) asks the question that common decency demands asking:

How can you be an American citizen and not be completely outraged, embarrassed, and disgusted by this conduct?

Brad DeLong gives the short answer:

...you can be a Republican Loyalist.

Brad's a very busy college professor and didn't have time to exapand in his post.

I've got nothing much going on right now, so I will.

In fact, a lot of Republicans are outraged, embarrassed, and disgusted.  They just aren't on the editorial boards of newspapers, don't blog, don't host talk radio shows, and aren't United States Congressmen and Senators up for re-election, and I'll get to the importance of that fact.

First, we live in a country where people support the death penalty even though it doesn't do any real good, either in deterring crime or in providing justice---dead is dead, and making one new dead body doesn't bring the first one back to life or, as studies have shown, make the grieving relatives and friends of the first dead body feel any better about their loss, let alone feel as though they've been compensated for it.

But the human need to exact blood has a greater force than the human desire to do right.  We are sadistic animals and want an excuse to tear something living apart.

Torture doesn't work, it's morally indefensible, but it's just so darn much fun to imagine another animal in pain.

Make the case that torturing an enemy gives the enemy an excuse to torture our troops in return and the defenders of torture will say, That's a risk our guys are willing to take, as if they would know.  What they mean though is, I get off on the idea of a hero getting tortured as much on the idea of the villain being tortured, maybe even more.

Torture porn is a main attraction of the old James Bond movies.

Top this off with the fact that people are cowards.

Prove to them that the death penalty has resulted in the accidental execution of many innocent people and they will say, in effect, Better that than one bad guy gets free to come after me.

It is just one of the lousy facts of human nature that most people will permit their rulers to do anything that makes them feel comfortable and safe as long as it's done to somebody else.

This is not a trait that's intrinsically Republican.  It's just that for the last 90 years, since the Party was taken over by businessmen and ran Teddy Roosevelt out of town, it has been the main plank of the Republican Platform.

It's usually summed up as I got mine, you get yours.  But that puts too happy a face on it.   It should be I want mine and if I don't have it, it's because you have it and don't deserve it, so hand it over, now!

It's a kind of apology to voters for the Party's generally Social Darwinistic and Calvinist principles.  Republicanism preaches that wealth and status belong only to the hard working and deserving either because Nature or God ordained their superiority to the rest of us.

But most people who vote Republican aren't rich, aren't high on the social totem pole, aren't obviously favored by God or Nature, and in their hearts they know this.

They know that by their own Party's principles they are LOSERS!

Not that the Party would ever tell them so flat out.  It's not much of a campaign slogan, Vote for Us Rich Guys Because We're Better Than You.

Honest conservatives used to say it, though.  They'd make the case like this:  Yes, you are a bunch of losers, despised by God and cursed by Nature, deserving of not even the very little you have.  You're lucky that your betters bother to do the bare minimum to keep you alive and safe, so don't dare ask them for any relief from your misery or consolation in your grief.  And if you dare to think that maybe this is unfair, remember this.  Any attempts by Liberals to improve your condition is just going to make it worse, because that's the way the world was designed to work.

Somewhere around 1929 this honesty stopped helping to win elections.

The Party began singing a different tune with lyrics rewritten to perfection by Barry Goldwater but which needed Ronald Reagan to turn into a song that eveybody liked to hum along with.

It was called the Politics of Resentment.

It went like this.  Only losers aren't rich and powerful, only real losers need or want the Government to do anything about their condition as losers.  But you aren't a loser, no matter what it looks like to the outside world.  You are born to be rich and powerful.  If you aren't, it's not because God or Nature gave you the shaft.  It's because OTHER PEOPLE are screwing you out of what you rightly deserve.

The demonization of the Other became the touchstone of all Republican campaign rhetoric.

This is what made the Party so attractive to the unreconstructed Southern racists the Democrats finally convinced were not welcome anymore in their party in the 50s and 60s.  Those guys were really good at demonizing the Other, having inherited 300 years of practice.  Probably why they now run the show.

Throughout history, most tribal people have treated the Other as less than human, lower than some animals.  Except for some of the more uninhibited Right Wing bloggers, the Party on the whole has chosen to treat the Other as an abstraction.  Big Government or entitlements or Special Interests or Islamofascism are all words invented to distance people from the real human beings the Politics of Resentment would otherwise treat as demons to be exterminated.

This has been done helpfully, so that xenophobes, racists, and barbarians don't have to face up to their own xenophobia, racism, and barbarism, but also so that decent-hearted folk who are by the Party's definition losers don't notice their own similarities to the Others and start asking difficult questions.

The Other has been turned into a non-person.

And in this way children can be allowed to go without doctors when they are sick, old people can be forced to choose between buying their medicine and food, men and women can be made to work demeaning jobs at poverty line wages with no benefits and no hope of improvement and no job security, air, water, soil, food, animals, human beings can be poisoned in the name of profits and more profits, without anyone having to notice the connections between what's happening and how they voted in the last election.

A Party that encourages people to feel nothing at the thought of 90 per cent of the world living in misery, poverty, and degradation as long as the 10 per cent they belong to don't have to pay an estate tax, isn't going to encourage them to have any qualms about some obscure Other---a Canadian with a funny name---getting tortured.

But there's more to it.

Another tactic the Party has adopted to help hide from their loyal voters the truth that they are voting against their own best interests, as well as against the better angels of their nature, has been to encourage a Cult of Personality.

This is simply an accident of Reagan's popularity, but it fits with the authoritarian instinct to wish for a king.  But under Reagan and now under George W. Bush, good Republicans have been encouraged to see no difference between their President and their Party.

Consequently, under Reagan and now under Bush, as stands the President so stands the Party.

When Reagan was President, it worked pretty well, but only in that it let Republicans turn a blind eye to all the many times Reagan betrayed the Party's principles.

Whenever Reagan had success governing as a moderate and, which sometimes happened, even as a Liberal, Republicans congratulated themselves on another victory for conservativism.

The Party benefited from the general misconception that conservativism was not what it in fact was.

The benefit will turn out to be temporary because one of the drawbacks was that members of the Party were fooled too.  They thought that Reagan's successes as a moderate proved that conservativism worked, and once they got total control of the government they began to govern as conservatives, running the country right into the ground and in the process violating the agreement they had with voters, which was that as long as it was done to the Others, it was fine.

Start messing with my comfort, my prosperity, my entitlements, my life, and you're history, bub!

Even so, the cult of personality made George W. Bush the synechdoche of the Party.  As he fares, so fares the Party.  What he is, the Party is.

If George Bush fails, the Party fails.  If George Bush is wrong, the Party is wrong.

This has put the Party in the position of needing George W. Bush to be not just successful, but always in the right.  Two things he is apparently biologically incapable of ever being.

Reagan saved the Party by being, often, successful, and by being truly popular.  People liked the guy; they didn't need to be told over and over and over and over and over again that not only did they like him, they had to like him or the bad guys will come and kill us.

Reagan also helped himself and the Party by being able to give up on a project or an idea that wasn't working.

Bush's reaction to being wrong is to throw all his energy into being more wrong.

He's the kind of guy who if you tell him he's driving the wrong way down a one way street steps on the gas.

Party loyalists in the back seat are forced to say, No, no, this isn't a one way street, it's just narrow, or if it is one way it's one way this direction and all those other cars coming right at us are going the wrong way but fortunately George is such a skillful driver that they'll all miss us.

We're winning in Iraq.  Torture is good.  Up is down, down is up, the lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn, Bush is in the White House, and all's right with the world.
_______________________________________________

One of the best accounts I've read of the rise of the Politics of Resentment and the mindset it engenders I've read is in Rick Perlstein's terrific book on the 1964 Presidential campaign, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.

Mr Met, meet Mr Watson

I don't know which I've enjoyed more this season, watching the Mets march inexorably towards the Division title or watching Tom Watson enjoying watching the Mets march inexorably towards the Division title.

Photo edited by the 10 year old.

Around the horn:  Dodger fan the Linkmeister watched his Bums keep their playoff hopes alive by winning the most amazing game the Link has ever seen.

Berube, though, doesn't like the Dodgers' chances...or the Dodgers....or the Padres or the Cardinals or the Braves...in fact, except for the Mets, Michael's got nothing good to say about the whole National League.

A typical English professor spouts off

Every time I think I'm out, they keep pulling me back in!

CJ Colluci and MoXmas are leading a delegation demanding I expand upon something I wrote yesterday in Sexual Politics, sexual jealousy, fiction vs. analysis, and the novel I should be writing:

Once upon a time, I drove one of my writing classes into fits because I insisted that people do indeed fall into types, that all of us are to a great degee typical.  I went on to say that there are in fact a very limited number of human types and I made a list that didn't come close to filling one side of the blackboard.

CJ and Mo and a few others want me to post the list.

This is something I'm reluctant to get into.

For one thing, to do it right, I need to dig out my old lecture notes and, even if I knew which box in the garage or the basement they were packed away in, that's a memory vault I'm not sure I want to visit.  It's dark, it's creepy, it's full of bats and spiders, there are at least three evil trolls guarding the door, and God knows what skeletons lay entombed inside.

And for another, I'm worried it might provoke me into writing the book I should have written 15 years ago, except that now I'd write it online in an endless series of long posts that would drive away all but my most loyal readers---Hi, Mom!---and which Atrios, Wolcott, Shakes, and Avedon Carol would never link to in a million years.

Maud Newton might link, but she'd be doing it out of pity, and who needs a pity link?

But then CJ, Mo, and the others are among my most loyal readers and their loyalty ought to be repaid.

Still, there's the problem of getting started.  Probably I should just post my list and wait for the angry objections to pour in.

Lance, you blithering fool, those aren't types, they're cliches!

Mannion, you horse's ass, don't you know the difference between a character type and a personality disorder?

Son, I love you, but even a mother can stand only so much tedious pedantry.

So it seems to me that before I got started I would need to define my terms, at least differentiating between temperament and type.

Then I'd need to explain how while a character may be a type, a type isn't a character.

I think I'll start there, because it'll let me write about something I love.

Cheers.

The main characters on Cheers included three variations of the same type.  I'm not sure what to call the type.

The pedant?

The know-it-all?

The pompous windbag?

Diane, Frasier, and Cliff.

All of a type, but very different characters.

The three of them approached life at second-hand, through things they'd read.  None of them could resist the temptation to show off their store of knowledge, and they each did it to establish their superiority over others.

But they had very different temperaments, backgrounds, and educations, and the differences caused extreme variations within their type.

Diane and Cliff were both damaged goods.  They were insecure, sexually conflicted---Diane thought her romantic and erotic life should be driven by her mind and her body's attraction to Sam confused the hell out of her and was a blow to her vanity besides; she never got over resenting Sam for making her want what she thought she should have been too good to want.  Cliff, of course, had serious Mommy problems.---and they were both egocentric and expected the world to revolve around them.

Frasier, because of his education and training as a doctor and psychiatrist, was more inclined to listen to other people and also step outside himself and see himself as others did.

Sam (advising Frasier on how to get out of the trouble he's in with Lilith):  Listen, I know what you'd tell me in a situation like this.  First you'd say a lot of gobbledy-gook no one could understand, but then you'd get me to go back there and face the music, admit the truth.

Frasier:  You're right, Sam.  Confronting one's fears is one of the five ways to resolve an inner conflict.  Of course the other four being...(Stops himself dead.)  God, aren't I a pompous ass!

He had more of sense of humor about himself and more self-awareness.  Temperamentally, too, he was more outgoing and affectionate.  Diane and Cliff wanted to be loved and admired.  Fraiser wanted to love and admire others and he succeeded.  It's why he was able to become one of the gang, while Diane had to stay on the outside.  He could enter into their games, often despite his better instincts.

Frasier:  Now what mindless subect are you beating to a slow, lingering death?  What's the best car?

Norm:  What's the best car song.

Frasier (like a shot):  GTO!  You hear them lyrics, boy, you're buring rubber!

His generosity of spirit, his temperament, is what made him not another second banana, but the second male lead, one of the show's three heroes, Woody being the third, although Woody wasn't a male lead, he was the juvenile, the young lover.  Diane was the antagonist.  Cliff was one of clowns.

Don't get me started on the differences between types and archetypes.

Cheers also repeated the type of the dimwitted innocent. Coach was replaced by Woody.  Same type, very different temperaments and consequently very different characters.

So, temperament is our inner weather, the inchoate core of our personality, the "self" that nature and nurture conspired to curse or bless us with.  Type is the outward manifestation of temperament, the face we present to the world, and it's shaped by temperament but also by expectation and choice.  Temperament is feeling, type is behavior.

People of different temperaments can wind up as similar types, and people of similar temperaments will turn into different types.

Some people are resenters.  They feel slighted by everybody and everything.  This is basically a very egocentric personality.  People like this just know in their bones that the world ought to be paying them more attention, recognizing their merits, and applauding their every effort, but for some really unfair reason this isn't happening.

Everywhere they go they find themselves pushed into the wings when they ought to be front and center, and it's always because the teacher, the coach, mother, friends, editors, bosses, or blog readers are inexplicably drawn to someone far less deserving!

We all know this kind of person.  But I don't consider this a type, because this kind of person shows up as a lot of different types.

My favorite is the Self-righteous Wet Blanket.

We all know this type.  The type who can always be relied upon to spoil the fun by pointing out that there are children starving in Africa.

When a conversation is getting lively, people are having a really good time, joking around or being passionate about something that matters to them, the Self-righteous Wet Blanket will always pipe up to point out that whatever it is doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

How can you waste all your time arguing about baseball when Bush is shredding the Constitution!

The object, of course, isn't really to make people be more serious.  It's to give the Wet Blanket control of the conversation.

This type is similar to the Little Red Hen who can always be counted on to bustle in when others are goofing off, or doing things that the Little Red Hen thinks aren't the things that need to be done at the moment, and make everybody else feel guilty and ashamed by the example of the Little Red Hen's energy, diligence, and responsible nature.

Some Little Red Hens are resentful personalities and they have the same object as the Self-Righteous Wet Blankets, to make themselves the center of attention and admiration.

But many Little Red Hens are in fact energetic, diligent, and responsible...and compulsive.

And, by the way, don't let the gender implications fool you.  There are plenty of men who are Little Red Hens.

Resentful personalities can also turn out to be Rebels.  They say they want a revolution, and they all want to change the world.  But when you look closely you see that the new world they want to create will have themselves as princes and princesses, if not kings and queens.

Other types that resentful personalities can become are the Instigator---this is the type who is always egging others on to challenge authority, act up, and rebel, while lingering safely in the background, out of range when the shit hits the fan---and the Underminer.  Underminers divide into other types:  the Saboteur, the Foot Dragger, the Naysayer, and the Obstacle Builder.

You know who I'm talking about, right?  They work in your office?  They live in your dorm?

Ok.  I'm sure you get the picture.  That's enough for now.  Tonight, if I feel brave, I'll go down into the memory vault and see what I can unearth.

Meanwhile,  I could use some help here.

What are some types you know and love...or loathe?

The strippers and their coach

Back when we lived in the Fort Wayne, the blonde played on a women's softball team sponsored by the paper she worked for.  They had a pretty good team.  For some reason the blonde and her pal Ellen were the only two women from the news side who signed up.  The rest of the team was drawn from women who worked on the loading dock and in the press room and circulation delivering papers.  There were a lot of strong arms and powerful bats.

They also knew how to put away the beer after a game.  Very important skill in softball.

One of the teams in their league was sponsored by a local strip joint.

Sorry to report, the title of this post is false advertising.  None of the dancers played for the team.

The games were played in the evenings, about the time the girls were starting work, and early on Saturday mornings not long enough after the club closed for the night for them to get a good night's sleep and still make batting practice.

Their roster was made up of the women who worked at the club as cocktail waitresses and bartenders plus the girlfriends and wives of male employees and regular customers.  Probably a few regular customers as well.

There are women who appreciate a well-done dance with a firepole, after all.

Strip clubs being what they are, the cocktail waitresses were not hired just for their ability to get an order straight and the bartenders didn't owe their jobs solely to their talents as ace mixologists.

They were a good-looking team.

They were also a good team.  They beat the blonde's team, twice.

But they were the only team in the league that did not have a player-manager.

Their manager was a guy.

He was a nasty piece of work.  Mean, foul-tempered, foul-mouthed, loud, belligerent, hyper-competitive.

He was not a poet when it came to employing four-letter words.  He swore at opposing players and insulted them in the most unimaginatively employed crude language going, and he didn't treat his own players with much more civility.

He screamed at the crowds, even people rooting for his team, he tried to intimidate the umps---he wore a hunting knife on his belt and rested his hand on it during arguments---and I'm pretty sure that once when he was coaching first base he tried to trip one of the blonde's teammates as she rounded the bag and headed for second on a clean double.

And he was ugly.

Toad ugly.

And short.

And fat.

I'm talking, five-foot five at best and two hundred and fifty pounds.

Grooming wasn't one of his virtues either.  Barbers, razors, soap, and laundry detergent were as strangers to his person.

Looking at him, you couldn't help but feel as Gussie Finke-Nottle felt watching Spode eat asparagus.

It altered your conception of man as Nature's last word.

Like I said, they beat the blonde's team both times they played, not that you could tell his team had won by his post-game demeanor either time.  I'd have hated to have been around him when he lost.

The first game, the husband of one of the other player's on the blonde's team and I were sitting close to the field, within earshot of the strip club's bench,  and during one of their at bats, the manager launched into one of his tirades and started screaming at his own players about what slackers they were and how they needed to get up there and get some hits.

The disgust and contempt his players felt for him were pretty clear.  When he lumbered away to take up his position as first base coach one of his players spat after him.

The guy next to me said, "Well, you know the old saying."

"What's that?" I said.

"If you can't fuck 'em, coach 'em."

Don't know why (he says innocently), but something I wrote in this morning's post reminded me of this.

Sexual politics, sexual jealousy, fiction vs. analysis, and the novel I should be writing

Read some gossip once about a former TV star, an actress who starred in a goofy detective series and whose main claim to fame was that she was "the sexy one."  A poster of her in a bathing suit was one of the hottest selling bits of 70s kitsch and adorned every other teenage boy's bedroom around the world.

You know who I'm talking about, right?

This actress never had much of a career after she left the TV show, but she remained beautiful and kept herself in shape and at 50 she was still gorgeous, with a figure maybe even sexier than her younger pin-up girl self's.  She felt confident enough that she insisted on doing her own nude scene in a movie our best movie director had the inspriration to cast her in---he's always been good at oddball casting that turns out to have been perfect casting---no body double.  It wasn't an intimate bedroom scene.  Her character was to go nuts and strip and frolic naked in a fountain in a shopping mall.

The splashing water hid a lot, but not enough that it wasn't clear that her body, altough touched by age---perhaps even because it was touched by age and therefore not movie star plastic perfect---was stunning.

You might think, then, that this actress was one middle-aged woman who didn't have to fear sexual rivals.

The actress had a younger boyfriend at the time, a guy in his thirties.  One day she found an envelope full of photograph's of his ex-girlfriend in a bikini in the closet.  As I remember it, the boyfriend was a photographer, the girlfriend was a model, the photos were leftovers from a portfolio shoot.

The actress went through the roof.

She took a pair of scissors and cut up all the photos into confetti.  Then she got mad.

I don't recall all the details now of her temper tantrum, the rag I read this story in may not have had them, but my impression was that she tore the house apart and physically attacked her boyfriend.

There could be all sorts of backstory here that the gossip columnist didn't know and I shouldn't try to read minds, but I can't help it.

On the surface this seems to be an old story.

A very old story.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me, who is the fairest one of all..."

Snow White is the story about the sexual threat a younger woman poses to an older one and the challenge the older woman's jealousy then poses to the younger woman.  But more universally, it's about how although it's the most natural progression that an aging generation must give way to the next younger one, the older generation isn't going to like it and may not give way gracefully.

The elders may not give way at all.  The fairy tale is a warning.  The older generation, some members of it anyway, will do all they can to keep the younger generation from its natural inheritance and place in life.

The story of the actress taking the scissors to the young model's picture is about as close as real life can come to recapitulating a fairy tale---it's the Queen snatching up and throwing the nearest heavy object at the mirror when it answers her question with the image of Snow White and says the girl is now the fairest of them all.

Think I didn't have Snow White, and Farrah Fawcett, in mind when I wrote yesterday's post?

The dustup over Ann Althouse's petulant and creepy attack on Jennifer Valenti might seem to be the blog world equivalent of a food fight between Delta and Omega.  Its seriousness lies in whether and to what degree you think Althouse and her bully boy readership meant to humiliate Jessica into silencing herself (or at least second-guessing herself when she posts)* or you think it was just a cheap way for that gang to enjoy some more Clinton porn together, a blogging circle jerk presided over by a leering Ann Althouse.

*I've come to see the post as an attempt to turn Jessica into a mere bimbo in the eyes of new readers of her blog and the men and women she has to deal with in her work as an activist in the analog world.

Ezra Klein wrote a very sane post---does he write any other kind?---in which he argued that Althouse's post is most pernicious because it represents a habitual debating trick of the Right:  Make it personal. 

When you can't win on the merits or the facts, attack your opponent's character.

The Right has been doing this nationally at least since 1980.  "Family values," "character," "morality," "out of the mainstream," "Hollywood Liberals," "the Culture of Death."  Knowing that polls show that the majority of voters do not in fact support the Right Wing's agenda, the Wingers, from Reagan down to that nut running for school board in your town, have turned every debate into a case of Liberals being asked to say when they stopped beating their wives, husbands, children, dogs, or puds.

Ann Althouse puts on her little pornographic puppet show, dressing up her Jessica puppet as Monica and Paula Jones so that she can then make her Clinton puppet drop his pants and drool, and then someone like Scott Lemieux steps up and in the course of making a good case against Althouse's pseudo-feminism has to waste time explaining that Clinton did not do what the Right fantasizes he did and the debate is suddenly about whether or not Bill Clinton is a rapist or a mere cad.

(I think Scott falls a little deeper into the trap by introducing on his own the moot question of whether or not what Clinton did do with Monica deserves condemnation and further scolding from good feminists.)

But Ezra's post is a little too sane.

He gives Althouse more credit as a conscious if mean-minded debator than she deserves.

As Scott and Lindsay Beyerstein make plain, Althouse did attempt to make a substantive argument---or at least she attempted to appear as if she was making one.

It may be that she knew herself to be so full of shit on this that she saw no option but to distract her readers by crying, "Look, boys!  Tits!"

But her readers don't need to be distracted from her swiss cheese logic.  They eat it up like starved mice.

She could have written, "A real feminist would never go near Bill Clinton," and left it at that, and her readers would have nodded and said, That's right.  We're the real feminists!

She didn't though.

There are five other women in that picture.  Althouse could have attacked their "hypocrisy" too.

This wasn't just a case of Althouse being a typical Right Wing bully.

It was a case of her being the Queen looking in the mirror.

How do I know this?

I know it because I know Althouse.

No, we've never met.

I know her type.

This is my problem.

This is why Ezra is far and away a better political writer than I am.

One of the reasons why.

I don't write about politics as an analyst or even as a journalist.

I write about it as a fiction writer, notebook keeper, would-be sketch artist, moviegoer, biography reader, general spy upon my fellow passengers to the grave, and enthusiastic fan of the human comedy.

I don't analyze.  I interpret.

I don't write journalism.  I write literary criticism and movie criticism.  I tell stories.

Regular readers of this page know this about me and I hope make allowances.

But I feel bad about it.

I've criticized the likes of Maureen Dowd, Joe Klein, David Maraniss, and other Media Elite types for writing novels instead of reporting the facts.  Even though I'm not in their ballpark, I feel I shouldn't do it.  But I give myself some license just because I'm not in their ballpark, and I'm not trying to play in their league.  I'm not trying to play the same sport.

When I write about Joe Lieberman as if he were a character in a short story that I wrote or George Bush were one in a novel I read, Senators, Congressmen, editors of important newspapers, producers of TV news, and journalists up and down the totem poll don't follow my lead.

Still.

Yesterday's post was kind of a throwaway.  What I wrote was window dressing for the links to Scott's and Lindsay's posts, which I hope you read because they're very good and not fiction or literary criticism at all.

But I meant what I said about Althouse.  She's a type and it's a type people need to be on their guard against becoming.

Once upon a time, I drove one of my writing classes into fits because I insisted that people do indeed fall into types, that all of us are to a great degee typical.  I went on to say that there are in fact a very limited number of human types and I made a list that didn't come close to filling one side of the blackboard.

My students did not want to hear this.

They believed that each and every one of us, and particularly one they happened to be themselves, is an original.  God threw away the mold.

But I believed, and still believe, that our uniquness as individuals comes from the multitude of variations we can play upon ourselves within the type we happen to be.  Types overlap too, so we can pick and choose what type we want to conform most closely too.  We can recognize ourselves as types, see how our behavior is typical, and adjust.  We can decide to act against type.

And although it usually means turning ourselves into just another type, we can decide to give up being they type we are.

I'm not sure, by the way, that we are born to be specific types.  Circumstances play upon our innate temperaments and the bumps and blows mold us into types.  But that's another post.

Ann Althouse appears to have been one type of person when she was young.  She's become another type now, an all too familiar type, the former rebel turned old fuddy duddy whose vanity won't let her admit she's a fuddy duddy.  With her post the other day she worked a familiar variation on the type she already is, so that the former pretty young rebel is now attacking what a more generous and gracious person might see as a version of her younger self.

She is not, by the way, a type that only Right Wingers and women conform to.

Don't you agree, Lee Siegel?

But she is a type.

This is true.

But I should have put it in a short story.

The young English teacher goes to the movies where he confronts the fact that he is not one of the Moderns

On the night of September 17, 1988, I was living in Ft Wayne and coming out of a movie theater where I'd just seen Alan Rudolph's The Moderns.  It's interesting to me that it has remained one of my favorite movies, considering the intensity of self-loathing it caused me that night.

Christ awful thing happened tonight.

Saw a good movie.  The Moderns.

Swept up in it.  A bohemian adventure.  Keith Carradine as the me I wish I was, as the me I should be busy being, Linda Fiorentino as my heroine.

On the way out of the flick AC wondered if Hemingway was as big a sap as portrayed in the film.  I must have smirked with an amused contempt that she took personally, for she snapped, “Well, you’re the English teacher.”

That’s right, I thought, and I was in such a self-pitying asshole mood because I’d be presumed to know about Hemingway because I taught about him and not because I might have something in common with him like being a writer, that I was mean to her on the ride home.  And I was mean to the blonde on the ride home too because she was not neurotic and sloe-eyed like Linda Fiorentino, and her lips don’t quiver like Linda Fiorentino's with some unfed appetite that’s too big and hungry to be anything but a symbol.

I feel like an English teacher not a writer and it depresses me to think of how I once played at being a writer—unfolding a cigarette pack to make notes on the paper insides while drinking at the Depot with Sally and Ann and Eckert and Olcott and then showing them my notes so they’d admire my poetical nature—not because it was young and silly, but because it felt like writing.

I feel I haven’t written an honest word (here especially).  I'm trying to stay up late writing things that hurt but I don’t want it to hurt when I write, so honesty is out, I guess.

A red-shouldered hawk at Deer Flat

I'm not sure, but I think that if Chris Clarke isn't about my age, he's younger than me, and therefore I might have enjoyed this post more if he hadn't decided to paint himself as an old man just because a seven mile hike up some steep hills gave him a few aches and pains.

I might have enjoyed it more.  It's hard for me to imagine how I could enjoy any post more than I enjoyed this one:

But my boots had other ideas and took me up toward Murchio Gap, and I lie now in the pine’s sparse shade. It is comfortable. A consolation of a long hike: you can throw yourself down about anywhere and be comfortable for a time, until the flies find you. A breeze and a swallow of water, and I lay my head down on my upturned pack to watch the sky for a while.

A perfect blue sky, with some few needles of Pinus sabiniana, now called “gray pine” so as not to validate the use of racial epithets. A half mile off, a turkey vulture spirals sunward, moving not a wing, not a feather. And the feeling comes over me so imperceptibly that by the time I notice it, it is as if I have always felt this way:

This is the best moment of my life.

Read the whole thing.

A middle-aged baby boomer cliche

Ann Althouse, tireless defender of a woman's right to be a Right Wing shill while pretending to be a rock and rolling Libertarian and and a feminist to boot, wrote a post accusing Jessica from Feministing of shamelessly possessing youth, beauty, and a good figure.

Or as Gavin at Sadly, No put it, Althouse indicts Jessica for the crime of having tits in the company of Bill Clinton.

Althouse purses her lips while making the case that because Jessica doesn't look like the Right Wing caricature of a feminist she isn't a real feminist.  Althouse wants us to think her post is about how no self-respecting feminist would ever tolerate the company of Bill Clinton let alone voluntarily seek it out---while she takes the opportunity to encourage her lascivious male readers to re-imagine that great moment in their libidinal history when Monica flashed her thong at Bill---but as there are five other liberal women, all of whom I'm pretty sure would call themselves feminists, in the picture that gives Professor Althouse the vapours and Jessica is the only one Althouse turns into a marionette in her little too obviously Freudian I secretly dream of Bill pornographic puppet show, it's clear that it's Jessica's looks not her politics that got Althouse hyperventilating.

Jessica responds, not just to Althouse, but to some people on the left side of the bandwidth who apparently made assumptions about her based on that photo.

I've taken some easy jabs at Althouse in the past for her ridiculous habit of presenting herself as if she was still her 20 year old self, a young rebel marching to the beat of Charlie Watts' drum, and not the most establishmentarian of establishment types, a middle-aged conservative law professor demanding her tax cuts.  Back from gambling in Havana, where he took a little risk, Scott Lemieux takes on the more serious of her pretenses, that she is any kind of a real feminist.

He follows up here.

But I think her attack on Jessica is of a piece with her rock and roller phoniness.  Both are signs of a Baby Boomer consumed by vanity and terrified of getting old.

Just an observation.  One sure sign you're sinking into a graceless middle age is that you start getting offended at people younger than you for having the temerity to be...younger than you.

Another one.  Scolding other people for their supposed sins and weaknesses is not evidence that you are good and virtuous; it's a clue that you are in fact a rampaging hypocrite.*

I'm talking about the Right's obsession with Bill Clinton's various character flaws.

Last one, a specific instance of the previous:  Because you express outrage at someone else's sexual peccadillos, that doesn't mean you are outraged.  It more likely means that you have found a way to hide your own voyeurism from yourself while indulging your prurient delight in looking through keyholes.

In other words, if Monica's thong and beret appear again and again in your conversation, it's either because you wish you'd been Bill and she'd flashed you, or you wish you'd been Monica and done the flashing.
___________________________________________

Monday morning quarterbacking myself:  See Sexual politics, sexual jealousy, fiction vs. analysis, and the novel I should be writing.  

* Lindsay Beyerstein puts a corollary very neatly.  Noting that Althouse accuses Jessica of hypocrisy,  Lindsay writes, "Here's a tip for looking less crazy. If you want to accuse someone of hypocrisy, you've got to start with what they believe, and find something they've done that's inconsistent with their beliefs. Your beliefs don't count for gauging someone else's hypocrisy. If someone does something that doesn't square with your paranoid fantasy plus their ideology, that's not hypocrisy on their part. Sorry."

He am the Left

Norbizness takes full repsonsibitity, for everything.  It's all his fault.  All the trials, tribulations, plagues, and divine punishments the Left has caused to be inflicted upon this great nation, he done did it.  If Right Wing bloggers can come up with more Lefty evil, Norbizness is ready to accept even more blame.

He am the Left and he's owning up.

Boston sketches by young man Mannion

September 16 and 17, a hundred years ago, at least:

At Lily’s in Quincey Market they roll out a piano.  Not always the same piano.  Sometimes it’s a baby grand.  Other times it’s a rinky-tink, bangy upright, and well-oiled Yuppies gather around to sing pop standards.  They roll out a different piano player with each piano.  When I rolled by at cocktail hour the piano player was a portly, stiff-backed black man.   Smoky is a better word for the piano player’s skin color.  His nose was long and thin.  His shirt was pearl gray.  He wore a black suit and kept the jacket buttoned over his gut as he played.  The cast of his smile was thin and toothlessly close-mouthed, mocking.  His fat was not the fallen gut fat of an American, but the contented, tight, high girth of an Asian prince.  But the set of his shoulders as he sat at the black baby grand (he sat away from the ivories, giving lots of room to his belly, although his arms and legs were short), the set of his shoulders, the upward tilt of his square head which put his small, flattened ears on the same line as his arched spine, was pure jazz, and his playing was as classy and unsavory, divey.  He played his own arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” and nobody sang along.  Five o’clock and too early for singing.  The piano player rolled his eyes and his smile at listeners.  He winked once at a pretty girl.

Tonight a young woman panhandled me in Norwegian.  She might have just been talking to herself in Norwegian.  This was on Cambridge Street downtown in the diffused flourescence seeping up the ramp from a parking garage.

Earlier, at the Dunkin Donuts stand in Park Street Station, a woman shaped like an apple dumpling bought three paper coffee cups and a chocolate donut.  First, she paid three cents for the cups, then, after counting her money, she asked what the donut cost.  Finding it not out of her price range—its purchase not a matter of living above her means—she bought the donut.  The dumpling-shaped woman wore a sunny yellow dress, a white fishnet shawl pinned to her chest by a red ceramic broach, and a wide-brimmed straw hat.  Curly red bangs—hideously and cheerfully dyed like a doll’s—stuck to her forehead.  She had dumpling cheeks.  She looked out at me from a blackbird's mimicking eyes and smiled a pouty, lipsticked smile.  Happy with her donut.

Working backward through my day.  This afternoon on Comm Av.  Tall, swan-necked young woman, maybe 25, small face, long dark blonde hair bouncing off her shoulders, playing on her cheeks, flying backwards behind her like a banner.  She wore faded jeans, green sweatshirt, unzipped, v-neck pullover, no shirt beneath.  Jaunty.  Shoulders moving side to side, long-legged strides, almost on a dead run.  Throwing big, beautiful smiles in every direction like golden coins to beggars.