Picking a qualified and electable running mate will be a snap for John McCain after the woes he has encountered trying to find a suitable campaign theme song. In his struggle to employ a stirring but appropriate ditty, McCain has been more apt to incite the artists associated with the songs he favors to consider chopping off their own fingers or poking their own eyes out with their accursed, misunderstood pens. Until now McCain has hardly been able to settle on a song that didn’t call forth a barrage of Cease and Desist orders.
Part of the problem is that these wily musicians and their intentionally ambiguous lyrics are designed to engender a mass following (e. g., Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”) while obliquely projecting their political slants. McCain wanted John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Little Pink Houses,” with its familiar “Ain’t that America” refrain, to stoke patriotic fervor and unify the electorate around simple homespun values–but someone in McCain’s camp eventually figured out that this particular jam actually decries the empty lie that is the “American dream.” Plus, Mellencamp is all about the farmers, that tragic, oft-neglected group that might well unseat the oil dynasty if we would only let them grow the corn to fuel our cars, buses, jet liners and semis.
McCain also tried ABBA and, well, they are fricking foreigners, you daft geezer. Naturally all of their lyrics are flimsily coded anti-American messages. ABBA was able to re-unite on at least this issue; they had a collective hissy fit. Bush encountered similar resistance in 2004 when he tried to use the Orleans hit, “You’re Still the One.” Ah, but songwriter John Hall was an anti-nuke activist. So now McCain, figuring Chuck Berry has been fucked over in much worse ways and might indifferently abide this dubious but relatively innocuous misappropriation, has jacked “Johnny B. Goode.” Berry is a self-proclaimed Barack Obama man, but McCain says he will continue to use the song, penned over a half-century ago by the pedophilic pee fetishist, because the 81-year-old legend has been, “the only [artist who] hasn’t complained.”
Obama is currently going with U2 and “Beautiful Day,” playing to the optimistic hipster set with his whole rainbows and jellybeans appeal. You would like to believe he could have found one song by an American band that would bolster his image and rally the faithful. But then again, Bono is some kind of Christian, and even with their half-billion dollars and staff of thousands Obama & Co. wouldn’t have been able to find a Christian-American band that doesn’t induce spontaneous wide-spread vomiting.
This theme song business is some serious shit, though. Kosovo, the newest country in the world, has just chosen a national anthem. I caught a few bars of the grim ecclesiastical arrangement on the radio today and was quite underwhelmed. Things are so touchy in the tumultuous Balkan state that the song has no lyrics. A spokesman said that because of the broad array of ethnicities, historical volatility and the clashing factional interests, there likely exists no sequence of words that would not be a potential igniter of conflagration in the region that has for centuries been the embattled border land between the Muslim and Christian hemispheres.
It is possible that the outcome of this historic U.S. election will be determined by whichever candidate picks the catchier tune, and clearly McCain is at a distinct disadvantage in this realm, judging from the apparent rage inspired in popular musicians by anyone associated with the Bush administration or even the Republican Party. It would be commercial suicide for any contemporary mainstream rocker to align themselves with, or even to allow any of their “art” to be used for the advancement of the conservative agenda, especially if they were a closet neo-con. So, taking for granted the fact that leftist posturing might for some musicians be simply the pragmatic option, let’s not lose sight of the more compelling issue at hand here: this presidential election is our first one out of fifty-six, dating back to 1789, in which we are free to choose a presidential candidate by basing our votes on the singular criterion of the candidate’s race. Now if that ain’t democracy then Chuck Berry ain’t a freak.
The Liar Next Time
Former Bush administration press secretary Scott McClellan’s memoir about his tenure as spokesman for Cheney Inc., What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, puts, at first glance, the final touches on the first chapter of the post-Skull-and-Bones-Bildenberg, etc., conspiracy world. According to early reports of McClellan’s book–in stores Monday–he claims he was but a mouthpiece through which the Bush administration dispensed, on a daily basis, the directives by which all branches of the federal government should proceed. McClellan, heretofore considered a “loyalist,” says Bush governed on a “permanent campaign” premise, predicated primarily on “propaganda.” And, says McClellan, he told nothing but lies. The guidelines for his evasive press conference babble were simply the will and vision of the Cheney-Bush cadre. Thanks for coming forward in such a timely fashion there, Scotty.
A cursory retrospective might suggest that George XLIII, by being such a dweeb, ruined the fun for the monarch-capitalist elite, going so ham-handedly about the diabolical duties of titular commander of the U.S.S. Free World that he gave up the jig. He cracked out of turn, as a David Mamet character once said. George XLIII is a fable character of a boy who inherited kingship but did not possess the capacity for comprehending that the sacred charade was to be performed with dignity and that he should, under all circumstances, remain in character so the masses would have an idol on which to train their focus, a hero to whom they could entrust their dreams. But he got up in front of everybody like some vulgar, gangly teenager toasting his elder sister’s wedding, sporting an unconvincing cockiness while mimicking the ritual, and destroyed all illusions of wisdom and solemnity.
Bill Clinton, given his hillbilly roots, could be given a pass for his theatrical blunders. And reportedly George XLI never even planned for George XLIII to be the ascender; it was supposed to be Jeb or Cletus or whatever they call the purportedly smart one. What makes it all so mythical and Shakespearean is that the drama is drawn from the unscripted eventuality of the ascension of the retarded son. Talk about mainstreaming gone completely awry.
This time, the moral of this fable is not, however, America wins again. Pop philosophy superstar, Slavoj Zizek, for all of his dazzling, convoluted intertwining of infinite academic and cultural references, seems to have made at least one clear political point in all of his writing, and that is that the killing off of Stalinist-brand oppressive communism has, by eliminating that vital counter balance, collaterally taken with it the whole of the liberal democratic movement, including the American “left.” Zizek might have hit on something. Our new “face to the world,” Obama–who has all but ceased participation in the Senate–is merely the perfect stall, should his whole impossible dream thing actually come true, a placeholder while they primp the facade on the next chimera.
What’s my point? There is none. There is no conspiracy. The whole thing is done so above board–and since Bush stripped off the veneer–grotesquely so, we cannot accept that the grand reveal is even true. We suffer mass hysterical blindness because we cannot deal with what we are looking at. They–the profiteers, too many to enumerate–do what they want and we can’t or don’t do shit about it. Bush, by buying oil to bolster our emergency reserve at an extremely critical juncture in a market already strained by Middle East instability, deliberately raised oil prices. A story popped up online at the UK’s The Independent site last Friday: Dr. Mamdouh Salameh, an oil economist who advises both the World Bank (a tool of US hegemony) and the UN, says his study concludes that without the war on Iraq, oil would be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of its present price, or about what it was before the war. Monitoring of the web for even one American news source who linked to the story has come up empty. It is such a forgone conclusion that it is old news nobody wants to countenance.
The Arabs don’t set oil prices anymore than a titty dancer sets the cover charge. I was lapse in my cynical astuteness assuming G43 waged war for long-range control of the oil supply, but the Bush-Saud cartel are reaping such ludicrous immediate gains that you have to marvel at the pathology behind what enables them to psychologically rock themselves to sleep at night while magazine color photo spreads of amputated soldiers and shrapnel-blinded children litter newsstands and coffee tables from here to, literally, Timbuktu.
Francis Fukuyama, a historian and a target of Zizek’s criticism, contends in his book, The End of History, that the modern advance of democracy and the waning of old school communism indicates that all great historical changes are in the past, that there is no turning back from the global permeation of liberal-democratic government. I am with Zizek; Fukuyama probably missed the point. They have rubbed it in our face that they can conduct extreme and protracted evil, motivated only by vanity and greed for power and profit, and with utter impunity. We showed them that they can shut down the farcical democratic process at whim (election 2000) and we will behave as powerlessly as any subjects of a totalitarian dictatorship. We sit idly by as the feeble and anemic Democratic Party has long abandoned its constituency and comfort ourselves that at least “He” will soon be gone. Well, we might not know what the next version of Him looks like but we know who he’ll working for.
New York City educator Debbie Almontaser was, according to the New York Times, forced to step down from her position as founding principal of the Kahlil Gibran International Academy public school, before it even opened. It was her dream that the school could mold a curriculum that would serve a broad cross-section of NYC kids and produce graduates fluent in Arabic and with a clearer understanding of the Middle East and Islam, so as to be prepared and qualified to go forth, as “ambassadors of peace and hope,” and bridge the ever-widening chasm that separates East from West.
Almontaser, a Yemen-born, New York-bred Muslim, tendered her resignation in the wake of a deliberate smear job by a New York Post reporter who artfully misused her words, quoting her out of context and omitting qualifying clauses from her statements that mitigated what the Post presented as militant rhetoric.
Daniel Pipes, director of the self-described “think tank,” Middle East Forum, a conservative watch dog group with their eye trained on Muslims, sees Almontaser’s efforts at the Gibran school as part of a long-con strategy of Muslims to promote radical ideals through “soft” jihad. Pipes contends that Muslims are slowly and, more importantly, lawfully infiltrating, at a molecular level, all facets of American society. Pipes fears Muslims with radical leanings are operating under the radar and are ultimately intending to impose sharia law in the United States.
Whereas Pipes might view Barack Obama as a potential Manchurian Candidate type of un-witting operative, a less savvy group of fear mongers began work in January smearing “Barack Hussein Obama” by planting seeds of dread via a chain e-mail that claims that Obama is a closet “radical” Muslim extremist. The email reminds us that “the Muslims” endeavor to destroy America and that one of them in the White House would certainly accelerate their affecting that end.
What if Barack Obama is Muslim? He certainly chose a strange route along which to run for president. You would think a Muslim extremist mole would at least come up through the Republican Party to take us off of the scent for a while longer. But no, this crafty underhanded bastard has risen to the precipice of prominence as a radical reform Democrat. That’s “reverse psychology,” where you hide in plain sight and so forth. More diabolical still, as a college student, Obama changed his name from Barry back to his original christening, Barack. Damn, he’s good.
Who would suspect a guy of East African heritage with an African surname and a middle name identical to the family name of an infamous Islamic dictator of being Muslim? The length of exacting calculation to which this man and his cabal of coup d’etat hopefuls must have gone is horrifying to contemplate. But, the most daring and paradigm-inverting tactic that he has employed thus far has been to speak at length on the subject of race at a critical juncture of a tightly contested bid for his party’s nomination.
He had to do something to divert the scrutiny of the press from his glaring Muslim-ness and steer the focus toward a safer subject. So this cunning operator presented himself as someone who comes from a culture and community that struggles with its own conflicted sentiments toward the white race in general.
The 9/11 Truth-ers and Loose Change folks–the people promulgating the notion that the Bush administration, in cahoots with World Trade Center ownership, blew up the WTC themselves and blamed it on al Qaeda as an excuse to wage war on Iraq, or some such business–never saw this one coming. The only problem with the Loose Change theory is that Cheney and Co. quite obviously needed no complex and impossible-to-pull-off conspiracy in order to go to war. They just told some lies to buy some time, sent in the troops, were found out in their lies, and re-elected. Where is the necessity for an intricate conspiracy plot in all that? Here’s the conspiracy you fricking yahoos, it’s not this president who is doing al Qaeda’s bidding, it is the next president who is a secret Muslim.
If Obama gets to the White House, is he going to blow up his own crib, family, flat-screened TV, and his own ass, like some crass suicide bomber? If your goal is to assassinate the leader of the free world does it make you re-think your plans if you are the leader of the free world? Or, would he quietly wait it out through two terms of molding the new Great Society and, after he’s out of office, with his full compliment of Secret Service entourage in tow, pass the floor plans of the White House, along with lists of security pass codes and descriptions of secret handshakes to some thickly-bearded guy in a turban on a bridge in Ankara or Damascus?
What if they are right about him being Muslim but wrong about him being “extreme”? What if he’s just a regular old Muslim, like five or six of my neighbors? Most are single mothers who I rarely see or hear anything out of unless they are coming from or going to one of their multiple jobs. Directly across the street from me is an African-American Muslim bachelor who drives a fairly new pick-up truck. There is often a lot of foot traffic in and out of his house. But it’s mostly just the white work crews he regularly hires to lay tile and frame walls. He’s remodeling his house. Pretty scary.
Pass the White-Out
Two nights ago, on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, I was walking home in South Philly, grumbling to myself about SUVs blocking narrow one-way streets because their owners abandoned them for quick sandwiches. Then I look to my right and see Bill Clinton sitting down with Chelsea and getting grubby with a cheese steak, right on the sidewalk–to very little fanfare. People were excited, taking cell phone snap shots and calling their moms, and Bill was letting anybody come right up and paw at him and shake the hand he was trying to eat with. The thing that struck me was that as small a gathering as it was–25 well-scattered people at its peak–they all really responded to the dude, and the dude to them. There was a Hispanic family, an Asian family, a twenty-something black couple, and random pedestrians of every variety–and there was no “Oh my God it’s the President!.” Instead it was a giddy “Oh my God, it’s Bill.” They just go to him like they know him.
Here in Philadelphia, I have enjoyed the option of squandering several opportunities in recent weeks to see either of the democratic candidates in person, and within easy walking distance. For years we have heard how presidential campaigns are completely controlled by the media, and determined by the TV strategies of campaign eggheads. Elections are long. The family of one candidate is working the street late at night, for the primaries. A big part of these things is decided on the ground, as they say.
Pennsylvania voters stuck to the script Tuesday and Hillary got her win. Obama, not terribly demoralized by the inevitable results, had–even as Hillary’s familial tentacles were glad handing working class Philly–already pulled out of the state to attend to more practical markets. The only thing the Clinton victory may have possibly accomplished was to bolster her latest strategy of hammering it into the Democratic party’s collective psyche that Obama would, as the Democratic nominee, have a daunting task ahead trying to wrest the coveted white, working class votes from a guy that reminds every hillbilly of their loopy estranged grandfather.
Nora Ephron (find her on IMDb before you Google her) is positively distraught that, as she estimates, this entire historical presidential election process will, ironically, come down to which candidate white male voters choose from the options of either-a-woman-or-a-black-guy, or an old white man who favors the illegal torture of illegally detained “enemy” combatants.
There are plenty of reasons not to vote and a variety of rationales that indicate that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, but Jesus lady, it is only April. Let the kids have a little fun.
Ephron is saying that even though voters from other demographic groups will each make educated, rational and color-and-gender blind decisions as to who should lead the free world, a bunch of misogynistic, xenophobic, anger management-challenged honkies will cast the votes that tip the scales.
Man, fuck that. Get off your sorry emo butts and go out and kick some metal head ass. Keep us honky motherfuckers from going to the polls. What do I care, I wouldn’t dignify that charade with my participation if they were giving out Xanax martinis to everybody as they came out of the voting booths.
Prior to the age of terror-alert-level color codes as a major campaign issue diversion, the women’s vote was divided and neutralized, and its electoral leverage had, for years, been gutted by one issue: abortion. Candidates felt little pressure in regards to how they were viewed in the light of any other issue, in the eyes of women, because once a candidate’s stance on abortion had been determined, the vote of nearly every woman was dictated by that. Women debated scores of other issues, but pro-choicers have not voted for fascist, right-to-life zealots, nor, conversely, have right-to-lifers voted for commie, pinko baby-killers.
Generally it has not mattered because these issues come in pre-packaged bundles. There aren’t many candidates running on a “Universal Health Care/Overturn Roe v. Wade” platform, and now, with John McCain pitted against Democratic candidate _____, it does seem time to unify the female vote. No politician really wants the hassle of overturning Roe, and McCain, crazy as he may be, isn’t a likely threat to focus his lunacy on taking on a nation of furious women. Iran maybe, but not politically active lefty women.
So to prevent us crackers (who Ephron assures you can in no way be trusted in this case) from queering the pitch when the curtains close, let’s go over a couple of strategies that will keep whitey from having his say on election day:
-Tell the white guys in your life that you truly believe they have a real chance at this Velvet Revolver lead singer gig and they shouldn’t spare a minute for anything that doesn’t involve preparing for their web-cam video audition.
-On election day: Free access to IShotMyself.com (NSFW)
-Schedule a Super Bowl with a Pamela Anderson-Condoleezza Rice mud-wrestling bout half-time show.
-Squidbillies marathon.
-Free Xanax martinis for anybody who knows most of the words to “Highway to Hell.”
All right, this ain’t a top ten list but you get the idea of how little effort is required to divert the abominable white man from his simple task of deciding the fate of the world, and you can use this as a guide to ensure that you will take back the night, fight the power, and stick it to the man.
Just remember though, a honky on a Xanax martini hangover can be a mother, brothers and sisters.
Long has written about sports, news, music and travel under various names and for various publications, including the Buffalo News, The Beast, Blue Dog Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the New York Sports Express, among others. He served a short stint as the guitar player in the Philadelphia metal-hop band, Incognegro. He also played guitar and sang on recordings of the Laughing Hyenas and The Unsane. He has dabbled in documentary and music video. He is a veteran of the US Navy and a graduate of the University of Houston. He lives in Philadelphia. You can google the rest.
So I’m flippin’ through the latest Blender like I do every 15 years (or however often it comes out) reading an interview with my favorite armed-to-the-teats lesbian hit man, Alicia Keys (whose portrayal of the afore described villainess you may or may not have caught in 2006’s Smokin’ Aces). From the interview, I learn she is not a member of the Cream tribute band from Ohio, The Black Keys, but she does tell me that it was the government who invented gangsta’ rap to get black people to kill each other.
Now it all makes sense. This government has consistently proved themselves so very competent in so many ways that the effortless play acting performed by Tupac and Biggie, et al, could have been choreographed only by an organization so exacting and perfectionist as that which dwells in halls of power in Washington, D. C.
Is there anything they can’t do? What with the storied cooperation and goodwill that has flourished between the clandestine, information-gathering branches of the government, such as the CIA, FBI and now I guess the late B.I.G. over the decades, how can they be stopped? And they’re so funky too. Who knew?
It was Gore, I bet. Tipper Gore, that is. Stumping away her days decrying and trying to suppress every form of musical expression on the planet, while at night she was in the VP mansion’s basement-studio kickin’ it with an old 808, a tube Neumann, pen and pad and some old school Koss cans. What times those must have been. Remember back when Clinton was running against Bush the 41st? Those bumper stickers that said George Bush and under that Bill Clinton, but the words Bush and Bill were crossed out, leaving “George Clinton: P-Funk in the White House!”
And you thought it was a joke? Maybe that’s what George Clinton did to get back at all those rappers who sample-jacked his jams without paying him. He conspired with the Billary Clinton administration to concoct a popular musical style so diabolical that the performers of it would kill each other in a public gang war. That old wily rascal.
It is a bold stance for Keys to take, however, suggesting that the artists who perform(ed) gangsta’ rap were not capable of fashioning the actual style of music that they so skillfully recorded, produced and performed, but that the government thought it up for them.
Or maybe I’m reading this wrong and looking ahead too far. Maybe Tupac and Biggie weren’t in on the con at all and were just duped pawns being moved around a game board that only the eye of the Man with the gigantic Hand is big enough to survey the enormity of. The Man that controls the world economy and so meticulously guides our domestic and foreign policies with such awe-inspiring deftness.
Keys must be talking about that same government who couldn’t think of anything better to do than sit outside of Manuel Noriega’s bunker in Panama blaring AC/DC and the Beach Boys from speakers propped up on their Humvees until puppet-gone-rogue Noriega caved and came out with his hands up. They used the same tactic towards Saddam’s Iraqi army positions in Kuwait in the Gulf War. These tactics are developed and deployed by the PsyOps (Psychological Operations) division of military intelligence. The work of pure genius.
Then again, if you sat outside my house and played even two Beach Boys songs all the way through I’d come out, guns a blazing–if I had any guns.
Keys says that “If Malcolm [X] or Huey [Newton] had the outlets our musicians have today, [the movement would] be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself.”
I hope she doesn’t have anything in mind like working up a holographic Malcolm & Huey rap duo like that creepy Frank Sinatra ghost she sang a duet with at the Grammys this year. But then, what do I know? Maybe Keys is a genius and she’s working for the government, too.
Long has written about sports, news, music and travel under various names and for various publications, including the Buffalo News, The Beast, Blue Dog Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the New York Sports Express, among others. He served a short stint as the guitar player in the Philadelphia metal-hop band, Incognegro. He also played guitar and sang on recordings of the Laughing Hyenas and The Unsane. He has dabbled in documentary and music video. He is a veteran of the US Navy and a graduate of the University of Houston. He lives in Philadelphia. You can google the rest.
Google Me When I’m Gone
If you’ve ever gone back as an adult and visited the place where you grew up, it is usually different somehow, in the immediate physical state, from the place in your memories. Google Maps Streetview raises the possibility of eliminating some of the discrepancies between your memory of a place and the actuality of it. Rather than you having to deal with only a few of these instances of there being two versions of the same place, there is now street after street of evidence that contradicts your memory–irrefutable images that signal the uncertainty of the pieces of your life that you think back on to realize yourself.
So, if Google tampers with your memory and makes you call into question the certainties of places and occurrences that you reference in order to form your identity, is it possible they can show you who you will become or what will happen next? They have already reached in, by altering elements of your self, and meddled with your time-space chain. Given their higher vantage point, shouldn’t they be capable of seeing further down the road?
Places that have dwelt in your memory over long stretches are not necessarily replaced when exposure to the current reality doesn’t mesh with your memory. You simply remember them as separate–one place that dwells completely intact and safe in your memory, and the new place that conflicts with that memory but that you are obliged to acknowledge. So you make two places for the same house. Even if after twenty years you were to move back into a childhood home to live, the version of that house in your memory would still remain, as well as a version of the house on the ground where you live now: two distinct places that are both derived directly from the very same matter and of identical geographic coordinates.
Subjective personal memory is a diminishing entity. People will remember things from exactly the same angle. You are rock climbing and something happens–somebody falls or drops the bag of energy bars. Your memory of the event from your subjective angle will be challenged by the video from the hat camera of your tech-nerd climbing buddy. Services such as Streetview can provide our subjective memory for us; the problem is that it will be identical to everyone else’s. Visuals are over-recorded, but there is a trade off. While video of seemingly every event on earth is available, snapshots from digital cameras are preserved on a highly selectively basis. Concerned with disk space, we erase shot after shot that is not framed just so, or where somebody made a face, or thinks they look too fat or whatever. With film, however, these outtakes live on for posterity and there is sometimes something to learn from them. For instance, those two creepy guys sitting in the car outside your house in Omaha last night are also in the background of this picture, where you look fat, taken on the beach in Mazatlan.
Looking at my small row home from behind a telephone pole I have to cursor right to see around the pole to my front door and left to see my front window. At first, the pictures on Streetview (judging from the dearth of traffic and the sun’s low position in the eastern sky) appear to be shot in the early morning. But now the images are from a later part of the day and my street is well into the dark of night. There’s no one anywhere on the street.
Now someone is in the corner of the frame, to the left, a few houses down the block. He wasn’t there two nights ago. And tonight he is closer to my door than last night. If I lean right again to peer around the pole I can see he is now at my door. His arm is reaching toward it. I hear knocking downstairs.
If this has already happened, if the pictures have already been taken, is what I do next even optional? If I start tearing along the Streetviews of my neighborhood, can I find the van this guy got out of? If, when I get back to the view of my house, I am laying dead across the threshold of my front door, is that now how I have to remember my house, and my self? Am I already dead and don’t know it, and Google is that little kid in Sixth Sense who keeps trying to tell Bruce Willis that he’s dead and it takes him forever to get the message?
Long has written about sports, news, music and travel under various names and for various publications, including the Buffalo News, The Beast, Blue Dog Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the New York Sports Express, among others. He served a short stint as the guitar player in the Philadelphia metal-hop band, Incognegro. He also played guitar and sang on recordings of the Laughing Hyenas and The Unsane. He has dabbled in documentary and music video. He is a veteran of the US Navy and a graduate of the University of Houston. He lives in Philadelphia. You can google the rest.
Sexy is as Sexy Was
The iconic academic authority on sexuality, Camille Paglia, recently bemoaned the absence of raw sexual magnetism and mystique in today’s American movie starlets. She cited Liz Taylor along with a list of bygone French screen beauties as exemplars of a lost sultriness that has given way to “banal” Hollywood “glamazon” tootsies. Paglia said that while the French revere and have preserved the feminine mystique, Americans favor Botox and boob jobs.
It is a common default cop-out of many jaded, self-distanced social commentators to decry change, necessarily challenging the legitimacy of the appeal of those who are young and happening. Then again, when I consider the sort of sex discussed in the public forum lately, I wonder if Paglia might have a point.
Recently, we have Eliot Spitzer, a pasty, self-righteous crusader, sporting a rank comb-over, who is central to descriptions of sexual trysts with a nubile and ravishing call girl. When he stood at the podium relinquishing his governorship, anyone watching had a vision of him in saggy skivvies and stretchy socks yanked up to his knobby knees, strands of wispy hair askance on his bony noggin, while opposite on the bed, a coquettish knockout–a fraction of his age–purred through stages of titillating undress. Then the flat-assed cracker mounts her for a few seconds of awkwardly stiff (but only in the rhythmic sense) sexual misappropriation of resources.
This news story is book-ended by findings of a study that says one in four teenage girls has the clap. Then we have a Presidential campaign that, for the first time since JFK, has sex potential: a strapping, sinewy, square-jawed lad with a smooth, candlelit voice is pitted against a fit, handsome woman who is strong-willed and independent–well, co-dependent–regardless, a potential Mrs. Robinson. But the only sexual imagery we can conjure from this scenario involves our sex mentor’s scag-addicted, hillbilly soul mate doing skanky shit with any one of the tarts from his parade of indiscretions–all of whom are the financial wet dreams of plastic surgeons and personal trainers.
Front-page sex is going to be unsavory. The good stuff we keep to ourselves (or post on the Internet), like naked photos of girlfriends. Looking to the olden days of entertainment to find better fantasy material doesn’t work either. By that logic the farther back you go the better things should get, right? Ever seen any French porn from the 1800s? It may not jibe with the Hitler mustache, female pubic grooming trend of late, but the bushes on these French broads spread from hip to hip. And whenever a dude shows up to do the nasty, everyone is yucking and clowning like they just opened a can of Mexican jumping beans. Is that the French feminine mystique to which Paglia refers?
As we become more dehumanized by our increasingly intimate interaction with machines by pursuing our fantasies in the virtual realm, we have become less savvy when confronted with the real flesh and blood thing. Years ago the prurience of an Eliot Spitzer or Bill Clinton would have been their business–not because it was off limits, but because people were still in touch with tactile existences of their own. JFK was a known player but his extracurriculars were responded to with smirks rather than seizures of consternation. Sen. Larry Craig and Gov. Jim McGreevey were knocked from the political rails for behavior that J. Edgar Hoover would have considered exemplary. Plenty of folks knew about Hoover’s unconventional lifestyle but did not consider it shockingly incongruous. The permeation of our vicarious indulgences has made real-time human behavior look like the fake because it is not pre-determined and has no time-code insert.
By training long stretches of our conscious states on some electronic diversion or other, we have become so removed from our bodies that when we are presented with a macro lens view of human motivations and frailties it appeals to the same sensibility as our curiosity of the macabre. It draws our glance toward goiters, crime scenes and bestiality acts. Today’s movie starlets are, fortunately, not clones of the Hollywood seductresses of yore. But those we lust after from afar and via digital formats have little to do with sex in the bedroom or backseats of cars. It would be difficult for any actress to exude and preserve her mystique, feminine or otherwise, after shooting movie upon movie in front of blue screens and then watching TMZ post video of her midnight trip to Walgreens for Motrin.
Long has written about sports, news, music and travel under various names and for various publications, including the Buffalo News, The Beast, Blue Dog Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the New York Sports Express, among others. He served a short stint as the guitar player in the Philadelphia Metal-Hop band, Incognegro. He also played guitar and sang on recordings of the Laughing Hyenas and The Unsane. He has dabbled in documentary and music video. He is a veteran of the US Navy and a graduate of the University of Houston. He lives in Philadelphia. You can google the rest.
