An open letter to public employees,
from formerly unionized private-sector workers
by David Benjamin
Dear Freeloaders:
Our lives suck..
We want yours to suck, too!
Our political outlook was ably articulated in recent interviews in Janesville, Wisconsin by the New York Times. There, A.G. Sulzberger and Monica Davey found cashiered ex-union members eager to condemn public employees now fighting in Madison to protect their collective bargaining rights. Lucky for us, these crack reporters from New York City don’t know that Janesville is locally regarded as the “Mississippi of Wisconsin,” a town that drew a red line through the middle of Rock County a century ago and spent generations battling tooth-and-nail to keep the black folks in Beloit from moving ten miles north and ruining their lily-white neighbourhoods. Sulzberger and Davey would have ruined their story by pointing out that Janesville is a longstanding bastion of right-wing reaction and bourgeois bigotry.
Like the white traditionalists of Janesville, we — the castoffs of General Motors and the casualties of Reaganism — have embraced a zero-sum world. We believe that if something good happens to someone else, that good something was taken from us.
We believe that if we can’t have it, you shouldn’t have it, either. Your good fortune is our misfortune. Your success is our grudge.
The only satisfaction left to us is to destroy you. Your destruction does us no good, but it will make you just as miserable as we are. And that will make us smile.
Lucky for us, there are powerful forces contributing to your doom. We know these forces, because they crushed us first. A rich and mighty few — every one a Republican (like us) — have systematically offshored our jobs, hollowed American industry, played craps with the U.S. economy, busted our unions and waged a relentless, ruthless war against organized labor. Knowing we are powerless against these forces of organized wealth, we have gone over to them — not as equals, of course. We speak for them. We dress up in funny hats and carry misspelled slogans on their behalf. They point to us, their foils, and call themselves, by association, “populist.” In return, some — but not all — of us receive the odd handout, or perhaps a comic, pathetic moment on YouTube.
We know that none of the “real money” hoarded by organized wealth will trickle down to us. That’s not the point. By taking away our rights to bargain, to negotiate, to discuss our working conditions, to fight for our jobs, to retain our dignity and to bestow hope on our children, organized wealth has left the post-union working class without pride or aspirations. We envy, revere, ogle and parrot the rich but harbor no illusions of ever becoming rich ourselves. We have become — as we were three centuries ago — peasants, beholden totally to the commands and caprices of “lords” who have no concept of how we live, who often wonder why we even bother to live.
We share our degradation with the public flunkies of organized wealth, among them Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, and Congressman Paul Ryan, a favorite son of, yes! Janesville. But these two lickspittles are more degraded, after a fashion, than we.
Walker and Ryan are not draftees in the war on fairness. Gladly, they volunteered to dirty their hands on the foul chore of eviscerating organized labor, justifying the redistribution of wealth upward to the super-rich and outward, toward Wall Street, Switzerland, and the tax-shelter islands. They are the lockstep noncoms of a swollen oligarchy that relentlessly hunts down and kills every lingering vestige of workers rights — affordable health care, pension plans, a steady paycheck, negotiated raises, paid vacation, the five-day 40-hour week, overtime, protection from industrial accidents, horny bosses, vindictive managers, office politics and discrimination in the workplace. Scott Walker believes in the American dream of upward mobility. But not for us.
The political servants of the high and mighty, these Boehners and Becks, these Pauls and Palins, herald a new American gospel of downward expectations. They point out The Other and obediently, we fear The Other. We revile and deny the poor. We despise the comfort of a prosperous neighbor and we work to ruin him. But even as we hate our neighbor, we kneel in humble tribute to the billionaire whose fortress is so far from our neighborhood that it’s usually in a whole different country.
We know that labor’s last redoubt is you, the unionized public workers of America. We know that life for you is a little better than it is for us, who either surrendered our power willingly, or had it torn from us by sociopathic prigs like Scott Walker.
We want you to give up. We know your defeat will not better our hopeless lives. We know that whatever shreds of wealth accrue to your destruction will go straight up the pipe to the lobbyists of K Street and the deposit boxes of Zurich. We know that you will get less, and we will get nothing. We know that, after promises by organized wealth that your sacrifices will save your jobs, you’ll lose your jobs — just as we before you were promised security and screwed the next morning… before breakfast.
We despise you, because you remind us of ourselves before we sold our souls for a mess of pottage, because you have what we gave up. We resent you, because what we gave up is so little compared to the treasure, the excess, the triumph and the towering smugness of those who took it from us.
We know who you are — teachers, firefighters, foresters, cops, nurses — honest people making a living. We know you don’t have much, and we know you are engaged in an uphill struggle to hold on for dear life. But we want you, like us, to let go.
We want you, like us, to despair. We want you to honor the thieves who stole our work, foreclosed our houses, mortgaged our children and blighted their future.
We don’t want your life to be the least bit dear. We would prefer it — and we will vote for it — to be like our lives, in a world without industry, without unions, without solidarity and without brotherhood: “… solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The Weekly Screed (#530)
“… It Takes a Train to Cry”
by David Benjamin
BROOKLYN — I cannot begin to understand why — in the name of Casey Jones — Republicans hate trains. Did none of them ever have a Lionel layout in the basement? Has not one of them ever sat frozen with foreboding in the movies as the train in “Shadow of a Doubt” blacks out the sun and brings into Young Charlie’s little town her charming, murdering uncle? Such a cool scene. How could you not love this stuff?
OK, I admit. I go back a long way with trainlove. My grandpa, Swede, worked 50 years for the Milwaukee Road. Every year, he got a free trip — always all the way across the state, to Milwaukee, to attend, ironically, the auto show. Once, he took me along. I sat by the window, glimpsing strange people living their lives in towns whose names I’d never heard of, whose existence strained my imagination, as I discovered for the first time, at speeds up to 50 miles an hour, how breathtakingly huge the world is.
But maybe the greatest ride of my life was a train trip to Chicago, with my eighth-grade class from the Franklin School. In Chicago, we hit all the obligatory museums. But the train was the thing. I suspect we all behaved quite well. But there was this sense that we’d been set totally free. On the train, we were cut off from every restraint by which we’d always lived. I roamed from car to car, talked with kids I barely knew, hobnobbed and socialized like Cary Grant flirting with Eva Marie Saint in “North By Northwest.”
Wow! Parentless and pubescent on the Empire Builder to the Hog Butcher for the World, the City of the Big Shoulders! How could you not love that?
Ever since the Golden Spike, trains have defined the American character. They’re the freight-handler of our beliefs, our dreams and our romance. The first full-reel silent film made in the USA was “The Great Train Robbery.” Produced by Thomas Edison!
The first really American song ever composed (ultimately in more than 80 different versions) was “John Henry.” Of course, it’s a railroad song, about the grim, dangerous and heroic digging of the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Line. The second really American song was, coincidentally, a riverboat song, called “Stagger Lee.” We didn’t get around to airplane songs ‘til Peter, Paul & Mary, just about a century later.
I grew up hating the New York Yankees, mainly because they were the one team featured, every damn Saturday, on the “CBS Game of the Week.” But I tuned in anyway, for Dizzy Dean, the color guy next to PeeWee Reese, in hopes that he’d sing my favorite all-time train song — which, of course, has about five hundred different verses.
“… Oh, listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar,
“As she glides along the woodland, o’er the hills and by the shore.
“Hear the mighty roar of the engines and the lonesome hobo’s call;
“You’re trave’lin’ through the jungle, on the Wabash Cannonball…”
The Cannonball was an imaginary train, based — some say — on the Ireland, Jerusalem, Australian & Southern Michigan Line built by Paul Bunyan’s brother, Cal. This juggernaut, 700 cars long, was so fast it reached its destination an hour before it left the station. And today? Still cannonballing along, out into space and across the galaxy.
I laugh. I cry. I sing along. I fantasize! What’s wrong with Republicans?
There’s not one worthwhile musician in the history of the USA who hasn’t sung a train song. Jimmy Rodgers, the great bluegrass artist known as “the singing brakeman,” crooned almost nothing but train songs. The Monkees had “Last Train to Clarksville.” The Beatles had “Day-Tripper.” Elvis sang “Mystery Train.” Coltrane? “Blue Train.” And the Stones? Well, they recorded “Silver Train,” but listen again to “Going Home.” If that ain’t a train song, nothing is.” Johnny Cash? Are you kidding? And… there isn’t a self-respecting fiddler on earth who hasn’t cut his teeth on “Orange Blossom Special.”
Whenever I have some annoying tune stuck in my head, repeating endlessly, my antidote is Bob Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” from, ironically, “Highway 61 Revisited.” I sing (off-key) the train song and I’m cured.
“… Oh, don’t the moon look good, mama, shinin’ through the trees,
“And don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flaggin; down the double-E…”
How could even a cheapskate Tea Party scold not love this stuff?
And yet, just since the election, three governors, Kasich in Ohio, Walker in Wisconsin and Scott in Florida, have sent back billions of federal bucks, killing thousands of local jobs, that were intended for high-speed rail projects. High speed-rail — notwithstanding that it runs on electricity — is a gas! Send these guys on the Eurostar from Paris to London, through the Tunnel. Or put them on the Helvetian Cannonball from Geneva to Interlachen. Or pack them into the shinkansen from Tokyo to Nagoya, where, suddenly, out the window, Mount Fuji fills the sky in godly symmetry.
How could even a GOP bean-counter with a permanent cob up his ass not break down at all the wonders passing by — at 180 mph — as he dines on haute cuisine?
Another governor, Chris Christie, killed a new rail tunnel from New Jersey to the Big Apple — even though, after centuries, train service between Jersey and Manhattan barely exists. Chris says, hey, just catch a bus to Camden at the Port Authority on 42nd Street. The Port Authority? The pimp, pickpocket, hooker and white slavery capital of North America? Chris? Why not just ship every terminal patient on earth to the lowest level of Dante’s Hell in hopes of catching the elevator to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Purgatory?
Has Gov. Chris never once watched that scene in “Casablanca,” in the Gare de Lyon, in the rain, as Rick reads Ilsa’s “Dear John” letter: “… I cannot go with you or ever see you again… Just believe that I love you.”
Oh, Ingrid, yes. I love you. I only wish John Boehner did, too!
The Republicans somehow believe we can live full, rich, romantic lives without this sort of stuff. They think we can’t afford trains, not the Orient Express, the Silver Streak nor the Atchison, Topeka & the Santa Fe. They want us to give up everything that trains, for 140 years, have evoked in our wildest dreams of wanderlust and adventure.
C’mon, you tightwads and killjoys! C’mon Paul Ryan! We need this stuff.
You guys never heard of the Little Engine That Could?
by David Benjamin
BROOKLYN — I cannot begin to understand why — in the name of Casey Jones — Republicans hate trains. Did none of them ever have a Lionel layout in the basement? Has not one of them ever sat frozen with foreboding in the movies as the train in “Shadow of a Doubt” blacks out the sun and brings into Young Charlie’s little town her charming, murdering uncle? Such a cool scene. How could you not love this stuff?
OK, I admit. I go back a long way with trainlove. My grandpa, Swede, worked 50 years for the Milwaukee Road. Every year, he got a free trip — always all the way across the state, to Milwaukee, to attend, ironically, the auto show. Once, he took me along. I sat by the window, glimpsing strange people living their lives in towns whose names I’d never heard of, whose existence strained my imagination, as I discovered for the first time, at speeds up to 50 miles an hour, how breathtakingly huge the world is.
But maybe the greatest ride of my life was a train trip to Chicago, with my eighth-grade class from the Franklin School. In Chicago, we hit all the obligatory museums. But the train was the thing. I suspect we all behaved quite well. But there was this sense that we’d been set totally free. On the train, we were cut off from every restraint by which we’d always lived. I roamed from car to car, talked with kids I barely knew, hobnobbed and socialized like Cary Grant flirting with Eva Marie Saint in “North By Northwest.”
Wow! Parentless and pubescent on the Empire Builder to the Hog Butcher for the World, the City of the Big Shoulders! How could you not love that?
Ever since the Golden Spike, trains have defined the American character. They’re the freight-handler of our beliefs, our dreams and our romance. The first full-reel silent film made in the USA was “The Great Train Robbery.” Produced by Thomas Edison!
The first really American song ever composed (ultimately in more than 80 different versions) was “John Henry.” Of course, it’s a railroad song, about the grim, dangerous and heroic digging of the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Line. The second really American song was, coincidentally, a riverboat song, called “Stagger Lee.” We didn’t get around to airplane songs ‘til Peter, Paul & Mary, just about a century later.
I grew up hating the New York Yankees, mainly because they were the one team featured, every damn Saturday, on the “CBS Game of the Week.” But I tuned in anyway, for Dizzy Dean, the color guy next to PeeWee Reese, in hopes that he’d sing my favorite all-time train song — which, of course, has about five hundred different verses.
“… Oh, listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar,
“As she glides along the woodland, o’er the hills and by the shore.
“Hear the mighty roar of the engines and the lonesome hobo’s call;
“You’re trave’lin’ through the jungle, on the Wabash Cannonball…”
The Cannonball was an imaginary train, based — some say — on the Ireland, Jerusalem, Australian & Southern Michigan Line built by Paul Bunyan’s brother, Cal. This juggernaut, 700 cars long, was so fast it reached its destination an hour before it left the station. And today? Still cannonballing along, out into space and across the galaxy.
I laugh. I cry. I sing along. I fantasize! What’s wrong with Republicans?
There’s not one worthwhile musician in the history of the USA who hasn’t sung a train song. Jimmy Rodgers, the great bluegrass artist known as “the singing brakeman,” crooned almost nothing but train songs. The Monkees had “Last Train to Clarksville.” The Beatles had “Day-Tripper.” Elvis sang “Mystery Train.” Coltrane? “Blue Train.” And the Stones? Well, they recorded “Silver Train,” but listen again to “Going Home.” If that ain’t a train song, nothing is.” Johnny Cash? Are you kidding? And… there isn’t a self-respecting fiddler on earth who hasn’t cut his teeth on “Orange Blossom Special.”
Whenever I have some annoying tune stuck in my head, repeating endlessly, my antidote is Bob Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” from, ironically, “Highway 61 Revisited.” I sing (off-key) the train song and I’m cured.
“… Oh, don’t the moon look good, mama, shinin’ through the trees,
“And don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flaggin; down the double-E…”
How could even a cheapskate Tea Party scold not love this stuff?
And yet, just since the election, three governors, Kasich in Ohio, Walker in Wisconsin and Scott in Florida, have sent back billions of federal bucks, killing thousands of local jobs, that were intended for high-speed rail projects. High speed-rail — notwithstanding that it runs on electricity — is a gas! Send these guys on the Eurostar from Paris to London, through the Tunnel. Or put them on the Helvetian Cannonball from Geneva to Interlachen. Or pack them into the shinkansen from Tokyo to Nagoya, where, suddenly, out the window, Mount Fuji fills the sky in godly symmetry.
How could even a GOP bean-counter with a permanent cob up his ass not break down at all the wonders passing by — at 180 mph — as he dines on haute cuisine?
Another governor, Chris Christie, killed a new rail tunnel from New Jersey to the Big Apple — even though, after centuries, train service between Jersey and Manhattan barely exists. Chris says, hey, just catch a bus to Camden at the Port Authority on 42nd Street. The Port Authority? The pimp, pickpocket, hooker and white slavery capital of North America? Chris? Why not just ship every terminal patient on earth to the lowest level of Dante’s Hell in hopes of catching the elevator to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Purgatory?
Has Gov. Chris never once watched that scene in “Casablanca,” in the Gare de Lyon, in the rain, as Rick reads Ilsa’s “Dear John” letter: “… I cannot go with you or ever see you again… Just believe that I love you.”
Oh, Ingrid, yes. I love you. I only wish John Boehner did, too!
The Republicans somehow believe we can live full, rich, romantic lives without this sort of stuff. They think we can’t afford trains, not the Orient Express, the Silver Streak nor the Atchison, Topeka & the Santa Fe. They want us to give up everything that trains, for 140 years, have evoked in our wildest dreams of wanderlust and adventure.
C’mon, you tightwads and killjoys! C’mon Paul Ryan! We need this stuff.
You guys never heard of the Little Engine That Could?
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Weekly Screed (#529)
“… Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild…”
by David Benjamin
BROOKLYN — “bieberized,” adj. 1 to be aware, unintentionally, of more pop culture crap than any self-respecting adult would admit to knowing…”
My first sighting of Justin Bieber was on Japanese television, in an interview conducted by one of Asahi’s TV’s infinite supply of chirping cuties. I realized the kid was probably a star, but I avoided learning both its name and gender. I hoped that that accidental glimpse would end my acquaintance. But I knew better.
I admitted defeat during the Super Bowl. When Bieber appeared in a Best Buy ad, I already knew him by name. Unlike one of the wrinkled rock stars in the same ad, I knew he was male (although I still don’t get the kid’s Donald Trump hairdo).
But never mind. Too late! I was bieberized.
Not that it matters, but “the Bieb” (where are you, Jerry Mathers?) is the latest in a long line of teen idols who look or sound (or both) like girls. Involuntarily, my hippocampus scrolled randomly back through Leo DiCaprio, Shaun Cassidy, Michael Jackson, Brandon DeWilde, Bobby Rydell, Ricky Nelson, Frankie Lymon, Bobby Vee, Ronnie Dee, Sandra Dee — wait, wait! I think Sandra Dee actually was a girl.
Probably the greatest of all LLAG (looks like a girl) pop idols was Wayne Newton. OK, who else remembers that Newton debuted on “The Jackie Gleason Show”?
Yeah, well, I do.
Probably the least bieberized people in my life were my grandparents, Annie and Swede. They’d given up going to the movies long before I was born; had no idea who either Gidget or James Bond were. Nonetheless, they were the ones who ruined me. They provided my portal — a 24-inch 1954 black-and-white Motorola TV — to the vast wasteland of dime-store celebrity and overnight fame.
Annie and Swede watched the tube with Lutheran moderation, tuning in Lawrence Welk, Jack Webb, Garry Moore, Ed Sullivan, Mitch Miller, even Paladin and Gil Favor. But they missed so much, Annie darning socks, Swede dozing off before the 10 o’clock news. While they ignored, I watched, learned, absorbed, understood, laughed at, wept over, believed in, and became one with every ghost that haunted the Motorola — from Ed “Kooky” Byrnes and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Martin Milner and George Maharis, Troy Donahue and Van Williams to Gardner McKay, Gale Storm, Eve Arden, Spring Byington, Fess Parker, Buddy Ebsen, Donna Douglas and Rod Serling. (A lifetime supply of Ipana to anyone who can match all of the above to their TV shows!)
I can trace, without looking anything up, the offspring of “The Danny Thomas Show” through “Andy Griffith” and “Gomer Pyle,” “Lost in Space,” “That Girl,” “Happy Days,” and “Laverne and Shirley” — all the way to “Friends.” (While, a generation later, everyone saw Gilligan, I kept flashing back to Maynard G. Krebs!)
It wasn’t just TV shows that rotted my mind. Long after Annie and Swede hit the sheets, I was staying up past Steve Allen for the late movie. I could tell every Taylor (Robert, Rod, Liz) from the others. I knew all my current stars, Heston, Newman, Monroe, Lollobrigida, and the bygones, too — Colman, Garson, Wilde, Rains, Lugosi, Chaney. The first two women I ever loved were Maureen O’Sullivan and Doris Day.
Worst of all, I discovered pleasure in knowing not just the big names but the bit players, character mugs and one-shot starlets. Was I the only fan in the world of Elisha Cook, Jr., Lyle Bettger, Celeste Holm and Dahlia Lavi?
In my defense, I practiced this trivia fixation in other realms— like music. While I have big-name records by Brubeck, Nat Cole, the Beatles, Taj Mahal. I also collect Nat’s brother Freddy and, for years, I’ve worshipped Blossom Dearie and Willie Pajeaud.
Of course, also, I hoard defunct books by forgotten authors — like Holling Clancy Holling and Tucker Coe! I have every dark yarn ever spun by B. Traven and Charles Williams. I own all the Homer Evans mysteries of Elliot Paul. And don’t even ask me about Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov!
Sports? OK. Who else remembers Walt “No Neck” Williams, Henry Finkel and Tommy Joe Crutcher? And who they played for?
Occasionally, I struggle against the inexorable synapse-clogging tide of bieberbilge, but now, it’s everywhere — not just TV, movies and radio. It’s in the phone, on the Mac, inside the Web, and throbbing from giant screens mounted on skyscrapers. And look where we are now — February! What’s next? Sweet Jesus, it’s the Oscars!
With this unavoidable pop-culture High Mass, I’m flooded with a vast new roster of silverplate celebrities whom I’ve never heard of, but who will fasten to my brain like sequined tapeworms. Who the hell are Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Jacki Weaver and Darren Aronofsky? It doesn’t matter. I’m going to know ALL of them by the end of that long, mawkish festival of gilded roses and transient glory. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Shlock is going to blitz my consciousness, and I’m going to have to make room between my ears.
Maybe Oscar nominees Jennifer Lawrence and Hailee Steinfeld (whoever they are) will finally supplant, in my memory, the lyrics to the entire C&H Sugar jingle (which I know by heart). Or both of the Oscar Mayer weiner songs (which I hear, sometimes, in my sleep). I would be grateful, at least, to forget all those beer commercials…
“I’m from Milwaukee
And I oughta know!
It’s draft-brewed Blatz beer
Wherever you go…”
Eh… won’t happen. Bieberdreck just keeps building up, like mildew in grout. The only way to avoid more of it seeping in is maybe find a monastery, in Timbuktu.
How badly off am I? Well, just to give you an idea, I can sing, verbatim, every verse, the themes of “Mr. Ed,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “Car 54, Where Are You?” (you know! Joe E. Ross — with Fred Gwynne as Francis Muldoon).
“There’s a holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn’s broken out in fights.
“There’s a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights…”
by David Benjamin
BROOKLYN — “bieberized,” adj. 1 to be aware, unintentionally, of more pop culture crap than any self-respecting adult would admit to knowing…”
My first sighting of Justin Bieber was on Japanese television, in an interview conducted by one of Asahi’s TV’s infinite supply of chirping cuties. I realized the kid was probably a star, but I avoided learning both its name and gender. I hoped that that accidental glimpse would end my acquaintance. But I knew better.
I admitted defeat during the Super Bowl. When Bieber appeared in a Best Buy ad, I already knew him by name. Unlike one of the wrinkled rock stars in the same ad, I knew he was male (although I still don’t get the kid’s Donald Trump hairdo).
But never mind. Too late! I was bieberized.
Not that it matters, but “the Bieb” (where are you, Jerry Mathers?) is the latest in a long line of teen idols who look or sound (or both) like girls. Involuntarily, my hippocampus scrolled randomly back through Leo DiCaprio, Shaun Cassidy, Michael Jackson, Brandon DeWilde, Bobby Rydell, Ricky Nelson, Frankie Lymon, Bobby Vee, Ronnie Dee, Sandra Dee — wait, wait! I think Sandra Dee actually was a girl.
Probably the greatest of all LLAG (looks like a girl) pop idols was Wayne Newton. OK, who else remembers that Newton debuted on “The Jackie Gleason Show”?
Yeah, well, I do.
Probably the least bieberized people in my life were my grandparents, Annie and Swede. They’d given up going to the movies long before I was born; had no idea who either Gidget or James Bond were. Nonetheless, they were the ones who ruined me. They provided my portal — a 24-inch 1954 black-and-white Motorola TV — to the vast wasteland of dime-store celebrity and overnight fame.
Annie and Swede watched the tube with Lutheran moderation, tuning in Lawrence Welk, Jack Webb, Garry Moore, Ed Sullivan, Mitch Miller, even Paladin and Gil Favor. But they missed so much, Annie darning socks, Swede dozing off before the 10 o’clock news. While they ignored, I watched, learned, absorbed, understood, laughed at, wept over, believed in, and became one with every ghost that haunted the Motorola — from Ed “Kooky” Byrnes and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Martin Milner and George Maharis, Troy Donahue and Van Williams to Gardner McKay, Gale Storm, Eve Arden, Spring Byington, Fess Parker, Buddy Ebsen, Donna Douglas and Rod Serling. (A lifetime supply of Ipana to anyone who can match all of the above to their TV shows!)
I can trace, without looking anything up, the offspring of “The Danny Thomas Show” through “Andy Griffith” and “Gomer Pyle,” “Lost in Space,” “That Girl,” “Happy Days,” and “Laverne and Shirley” — all the way to “Friends.” (While, a generation later, everyone saw Gilligan, I kept flashing back to Maynard G. Krebs!)
It wasn’t just TV shows that rotted my mind. Long after Annie and Swede hit the sheets, I was staying up past Steve Allen for the late movie. I could tell every Taylor (Robert, Rod, Liz) from the others. I knew all my current stars, Heston, Newman, Monroe, Lollobrigida, and the bygones, too — Colman, Garson, Wilde, Rains, Lugosi, Chaney. The first two women I ever loved were Maureen O’Sullivan and Doris Day.
Worst of all, I discovered pleasure in knowing not just the big names but the bit players, character mugs and one-shot starlets. Was I the only fan in the world of Elisha Cook, Jr., Lyle Bettger, Celeste Holm and Dahlia Lavi?
In my defense, I practiced this trivia fixation in other realms— like music. While I have big-name records by Brubeck, Nat Cole, the Beatles, Taj Mahal. I also collect Nat’s brother Freddy and, for years, I’ve worshipped Blossom Dearie and Willie Pajeaud.
Of course, also, I hoard defunct books by forgotten authors — like Holling Clancy Holling and Tucker Coe! I have every dark yarn ever spun by B. Traven and Charles Williams. I own all the Homer Evans mysteries of Elliot Paul. And don’t even ask me about Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov!
Sports? OK. Who else remembers Walt “No Neck” Williams, Henry Finkel and Tommy Joe Crutcher? And who they played for?
Occasionally, I struggle against the inexorable synapse-clogging tide of bieberbilge, but now, it’s everywhere — not just TV, movies and radio. It’s in the phone, on the Mac, inside the Web, and throbbing from giant screens mounted on skyscrapers. And look where we are now — February! What’s next? Sweet Jesus, it’s the Oscars!
With this unavoidable pop-culture High Mass, I’m flooded with a vast new roster of silverplate celebrities whom I’ve never heard of, but who will fasten to my brain like sequined tapeworms. Who the hell are Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Jacki Weaver and Darren Aronofsky? It doesn’t matter. I’m going to know ALL of them by the end of that long, mawkish festival of gilded roses and transient glory. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Shlock is going to blitz my consciousness, and I’m going to have to make room between my ears.
Maybe Oscar nominees Jennifer Lawrence and Hailee Steinfeld (whoever they are) will finally supplant, in my memory, the lyrics to the entire C&H Sugar jingle (which I know by heart). Or both of the Oscar Mayer weiner songs (which I hear, sometimes, in my sleep). I would be grateful, at least, to forget all those beer commercials…
“I’m from Milwaukee
And I oughta know!
It’s draft-brewed Blatz beer
Wherever you go…”
Eh… won’t happen. Bieberdreck just keeps building up, like mildew in grout. The only way to avoid more of it seeping in is maybe find a monastery, in Timbuktu.
How badly off am I? Well, just to give you an idea, I can sing, verbatim, every verse, the themes of “Mr. Ed,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “Car 54, Where Are You?” (you know! Joe E. Ross — with Fred Gwynne as Francis Muldoon).
“There’s a holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn’s broken out in fights.
“There’s a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights…”
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
The Weekly Screed (#528) 2 Feb. '11
Punxsutawney Phil opens up — wide!
by David Benjamin
GOBBLER’S KNOB, Pa. — “Six more weeks of winter? Are you kiddin’ me? You bet your ass there’s gonna be six more weeks of winter! And six more after that, and then another six, topped off by something that looks more like nuclear winter. Forever, man!”
This, of course, was the statement issued today, Groundhog Day, by Punxsutawney Phil, in front of his Pennsylvania burrow. But this outspoken rodent was not the shy, retiring Phil of years past. The famous groundhog seems to have undergone what can only be described as a personality transplant.
“No, no,” he insisted. “I’m the same old lovable, furry Phil. It’s just that I finally got cable in my burrow. My God! I’m amazed! All the stuff I’ve been missing.”
Indeed, Punxsutawney Phil, long sequestered underground with little knowledge of the outside world, has been glued to the flat-screen Vizio that was provided to him last fall by the grateful town fathers of Punxsutawney.
“Once I got that TV, I couldn’t bring myself to hibernate,” said Phil, as he settled down in front of his burrow, crossed his legs, lit a cigarette and beckoned the media to come closer. “For instance, a black president? Who woulda thunk that, huh? And he’s gone two years now without getting shot by Haley Barbour! The mind boggles, bro! And now, suddenly, this business in Egypt? Man, it’s freakin’ me out. I mean, things look cool in Cairo now, but one spark and whaddya got? Detroit in ’67, right?
“Damn, the only thing that seems normal is the Packers in the Super Bowl!”
Someone tried to ask Phil a question but the celebrated groundhog of Jefferson County just continued to rant.
“Watching cable all the time, you know what really fries my whiskers?” said Phil. “It’s this Glenn Beck character. What hole did he crawl out of? And every stinkin’ day? — the same thing. He predicts the Apocalypse. That, dammit, is my gig! I’m the great forecaster. He’s just a talking head with a jones for used wedding rings.”
David Gregory of NBC asked if Phil had his own the end-of-the-world vision.
“Of course I do,” said Phil. “It’s coming, lickety-split! Thing is — I was pretty much an optimist ‘til I got cable. Now, I can see the handwriting on the LCD. The thing that’s gonna bring civilization as we know it to a grinding halt is blowhards. We got too many of ‘em, starting with this Beck shmuck, and going right on through big fat Rush, Hannity, Chuck Todd, David Brooks, Ed Schultz, Leno, Conan, two guys named Wolf and Wolffe for some reason, Anderson Cooper, O’Reilly, Colbert. Jon Stewart. And some maniac screaming about Oxy-Clean! Not to mention all these hormone-infested raging women, Sarah and that lunatic Michelle and the other Michelle who’s even crazier and Ann, the Nazi blonde, plus big fat Rosie and the lesbian on MSNBC. I mean, what happened while I was sleeping? You lost all control over the broads? What ever happened to barefoot and pregnant? Sheesh!”
Phil couldn’t stop. “And in Congress! Dear God! You got McConnell and McCain, and those crazy-ass know-nothings from Texas, Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin! Wisconsin? When did Wisconsin go off the deep end? What the hell’s going out there? And wait a minute! The Speaker of the House is named Boehner? What’s his nickname — Stiffy? Does he tell everybody he’s a stand-up guy?”
Phil stopped to snigger obscenely, allowing a reporter to ask him his prediction: “You’re saying that blowhards are going to trigger the End of Days. But how?”
“How?! Look around, doofus,” said Phil not very respectfully. “The blowhards are sucking up all the oxygen and turning it into toxic fumes. Nothing else comes out. I’ve been watching cable for six months and I haven’t heard two people agree on anything. These loudmouths know what they don’t want. They announce who they hate, every minute, every day. They proclaim their greatest fears and their deepest loathing. But I sit there in my burrow and I keep saying, ‘Do you gasbags have any plans? You’re like those poor bastards on the streets in Cairo. You have no idea what comes next!’”
“But they do have plans!” shouted the editor of The Weekly Standard. “They plan to cut taxes — again and again, over and over and over!”
Phil sat back and grinned toothfully. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s what the idiots are gonna do — the only thing they can think of. Cut taxes and cut taxes ‘til there are no taxes, and the world is slowly engulfed by a vast poisonous miasma of inaction, inequality, ignorance, poverty and despair. Which will leave everyone just standing around, like an episode of that zombie show — ‘The Walking Dead?’ Most of you — humans — the normal people, the liberals and moderates and swing voters and Tea Party dupes, all you people with jobs, kids, houses, responsibilities, all you suckers who tuned in and believed that the blowhards were spouting pure all-American gospel? You’ll be the walking dead, all raggedy and dopey with bloodstains on your best shirt and your innards exposed, falling into giant potholes, eating roadkill and killing strangers for a tank of gas. The ones with the best guns, who’ll be hiding behind electric fences in northwoods fortresses — that’ll be the blowhards and their bankers. That’ll the Goldman Sachs crowd and the tycoons from BP and GE and AIG, Intel, Google and Microsoft.
“But, thank goodness,” said Punxsutawney Phil, “I won’t be around for your pathetic, self-imposed Apocalypse. As soon as the TV dies, I’ll just burrow a little deeper and hibernate ‘til all the walking dead turn into the actual dead. I might have to sleep for a hundred years. Afterwards, I foresee a few human survivors, but they’ll be more like us burrow-dwellers, naked, illiterate and pure — digging up roots and devouring grubs.”
One reporter said that Phil’s scenario seemed a little paranoid and far-fetched.
“Far-fetched?” said Phil. “Hey, all I know is what I see on cable. I get all my information in my hole, watching TV and trusting my eyes. All I’m predicting is that the world will end not with a bang, but a brain-fart.
“But hey! You wanna hear paranoid and far-fetched? Tune in to C-Span!”
by David Benjamin
GOBBLER’S KNOB, Pa. — “Six more weeks of winter? Are you kiddin’ me? You bet your ass there’s gonna be six more weeks of winter! And six more after that, and then another six, topped off by something that looks more like nuclear winter. Forever, man!”
This, of course, was the statement issued today, Groundhog Day, by Punxsutawney Phil, in front of his Pennsylvania burrow. But this outspoken rodent was not the shy, retiring Phil of years past. The famous groundhog seems to have undergone what can only be described as a personality transplant.
“No, no,” he insisted. “I’m the same old lovable, furry Phil. It’s just that I finally got cable in my burrow. My God! I’m amazed! All the stuff I’ve been missing.”
Indeed, Punxsutawney Phil, long sequestered underground with little knowledge of the outside world, has been glued to the flat-screen Vizio that was provided to him last fall by the grateful town fathers of Punxsutawney.
“Once I got that TV, I couldn’t bring myself to hibernate,” said Phil, as he settled down in front of his burrow, crossed his legs, lit a cigarette and beckoned the media to come closer. “For instance, a black president? Who woulda thunk that, huh? And he’s gone two years now without getting shot by Haley Barbour! The mind boggles, bro! And now, suddenly, this business in Egypt? Man, it’s freakin’ me out. I mean, things look cool in Cairo now, but one spark and whaddya got? Detroit in ’67, right?
“Damn, the only thing that seems normal is the Packers in the Super Bowl!”
Someone tried to ask Phil a question but the celebrated groundhog of Jefferson County just continued to rant.
“Watching cable all the time, you know what really fries my whiskers?” said Phil. “It’s this Glenn Beck character. What hole did he crawl out of? And every stinkin’ day? — the same thing. He predicts the Apocalypse. That, dammit, is my gig! I’m the great forecaster. He’s just a talking head with a jones for used wedding rings.”
David Gregory of NBC asked if Phil had his own the end-of-the-world vision.
“Of course I do,” said Phil. “It’s coming, lickety-split! Thing is — I was pretty much an optimist ‘til I got cable. Now, I can see the handwriting on the LCD. The thing that’s gonna bring civilization as we know it to a grinding halt is blowhards. We got too many of ‘em, starting with this Beck shmuck, and going right on through big fat Rush, Hannity, Chuck Todd, David Brooks, Ed Schultz, Leno, Conan, two guys named Wolf and Wolffe for some reason, Anderson Cooper, O’Reilly, Colbert. Jon Stewart. And some maniac screaming about Oxy-Clean! Not to mention all these hormone-infested raging women, Sarah and that lunatic Michelle and the other Michelle who’s even crazier and Ann, the Nazi blonde, plus big fat Rosie and the lesbian on MSNBC. I mean, what happened while I was sleeping? You lost all control over the broads? What ever happened to barefoot and pregnant? Sheesh!”
Phil couldn’t stop. “And in Congress! Dear God! You got McConnell and McCain, and those crazy-ass know-nothings from Texas, Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin! Wisconsin? When did Wisconsin go off the deep end? What the hell’s going out there? And wait a minute! The Speaker of the House is named Boehner? What’s his nickname — Stiffy? Does he tell everybody he’s a stand-up guy?”
Phil stopped to snigger obscenely, allowing a reporter to ask him his prediction: “You’re saying that blowhards are going to trigger the End of Days. But how?”
“How?! Look around, doofus,” said Phil not very respectfully. “The blowhards are sucking up all the oxygen and turning it into toxic fumes. Nothing else comes out. I’ve been watching cable for six months and I haven’t heard two people agree on anything. These loudmouths know what they don’t want. They announce who they hate, every minute, every day. They proclaim their greatest fears and their deepest loathing. But I sit there in my burrow and I keep saying, ‘Do you gasbags have any plans? You’re like those poor bastards on the streets in Cairo. You have no idea what comes next!’”
“But they do have plans!” shouted the editor of The Weekly Standard. “They plan to cut taxes — again and again, over and over and over!”
Phil sat back and grinned toothfully. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s what the idiots are gonna do — the only thing they can think of. Cut taxes and cut taxes ‘til there are no taxes, and the world is slowly engulfed by a vast poisonous miasma of inaction, inequality, ignorance, poverty and despair. Which will leave everyone just standing around, like an episode of that zombie show — ‘The Walking Dead?’ Most of you — humans — the normal people, the liberals and moderates and swing voters and Tea Party dupes, all you people with jobs, kids, houses, responsibilities, all you suckers who tuned in and believed that the blowhards were spouting pure all-American gospel? You’ll be the walking dead, all raggedy and dopey with bloodstains on your best shirt and your innards exposed, falling into giant potholes, eating roadkill and killing strangers for a tank of gas. The ones with the best guns, who’ll be hiding behind electric fences in northwoods fortresses — that’ll be the blowhards and their bankers. That’ll the Goldman Sachs crowd and the tycoons from BP and GE and AIG, Intel, Google and Microsoft.
“But, thank goodness,” said Punxsutawney Phil, “I won’t be around for your pathetic, self-imposed Apocalypse. As soon as the TV dies, I’ll just burrow a little deeper and hibernate ‘til all the walking dead turn into the actual dead. I might have to sleep for a hundred years. Afterwards, I foresee a few human survivors, but they’ll be more like us burrow-dwellers, naked, illiterate and pure — digging up roots and devouring grubs.”
One reporter said that Phil’s scenario seemed a little paranoid and far-fetched.
“Far-fetched?” said Phil. “Hey, all I know is what I see on cable. I get all my information in my hole, watching TV and trusting my eyes. All I’m predicting is that the world will end not with a bang, but a brain-fart.
“But hey! You wanna hear paranoid and far-fetched? Tune in to C-Span!”
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