FEY/PALIN 2008: Now, before I start I should admit that I’ve got the standard nerd’s hots for Tina Fey, or I would, if I were thirty years younger. I think she’s the funniest woman writing since Veronica Geng died, and with Geng, if you didn’t live here in the northeastern part of this our Great Republic, a lot of her stuff would just go right by you. You don’t get that sort of disconnect with Fey. So I was really looking forward to the season premiere of SNL; from the first moment I saw Sarah Palin (my first reaction was that the GOP nominated Tina Fey’s older sister) I knew that I would have to watch the season opener. I just knew.

And it did not disappoint. The show’s opening was five minutes of the smartest comedy I’ve seen in a long time (the rest of the show was just so—so) and I laughed like nobody’s business. One of the smartest of the lines was that one where Amy Poehler’s faux Sen. Clinton states that diplomacy must be the basis of any successful foreign policy and Fey’s faux Palin says, “And I can see Russia from my house!” I loved that line, but now that a couple days have gone by, I can see how I might not think that line was so funny if I were a Georgian or a Kazakh or a Ukrainian. Those folks actually can see Russia from their houses and they don’t like what they see. It’s all a matter of perspective, I guess; obnoxious neighbors are always funny when you don't actually have to live next door to them.

REVIEW:

[cut to camera 3; sportscaster turns to face camera]

…and finally in high school sports tonight, our happy little burg’s varsity Goth team met the league champion Visigoths in the school cafeteria for a pentathlon whinefest. Events included the 100 meter angst, the black makeup hurdles to a getting a job flipping burgers, and the forty kilometer stay in your room with the noise playing so loud the neighbor’s cat can’t hear himself think while writing incredibly bad poetry about what awful snots your totally out of it parents are. The home team held its own until the fourth quarter, when the Visigoths stapled their eyelids shut while piercing their tongues with a white hot fork, which gave them the lead. They were able to hang on to the lead, despite a lackadaisical effort by the home Goths, until the clock ran out the door with the homecoming queen and win, 35-32. Afterwards, the band ritually slaughtered ‘God Bless America’ while the Austrogoths, the team of exchange Goths from Down Under put a mess of shrimp on the barbies for the fans. The two teams did not have any shrimp, preferring to go to their rooms to sulk for a while. And that’s sports. Brian, back to you.

Anchorman: Thanks, Charlie. There any chance of the home Goths going to the championships this year?

Sportscaster: I don’t think so, Brian, but my sources in the high school’s athletic program tell me that there’s a couple of real slackers on the junior varsity who can bitch, moan, and whine like nobody’s business. The coaches don’t expect much from them one way or the other, so there’s a lot of hope for next year.

Anchorman [gives that little insincere chuckle that tells you he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about a bunch of moronic pimply-faced teenagers who like to wear weird clothes; this two-bit tank town is just one more ticket to punch on his way up to the network.] : Well, wait’ll next year it is, then. Thanks, Charlie. [turns to Camera 1] A new action thriller opened at the Cineplex today, the much-awaited sequel to The Roach Ultimatum, and here is Todd Talbot with his review. Todd?

[cut to film critic, a man clearly driven out of his mind by the vast amounts of inane drivel he has to watch every year. This should come as no surprise to anyone, since motion pictures in our day and age are made for adolescents and therefore reflect an adolescent sensibility, if you can call adolescents sensible in any meaningful way and that’s always a debatable point, a sensibility formed by the vast amounts of inane drivel they watch on their televisions and their computers all day long, which accustoms them to the practice of spending large amounts of their parents’ money on inane drivel in movie theaters as well. You’d think they’d catch on to the fact that what they’re watching is little more than cinematic slop, but they don’t, what with their critical faculties dulled by years of modern education, and why should the producers spend money making a real motion picture with a real plot and real production values when car chases, massive explosions in Dolby surround sound stereo, and nubile young women wearing or not wearing, as the case may be, the minimum amount of clothing necessary to keep this dog from getting an NC-17 rating will cover any plot hole you’d care to think of?]

Film critic: Thanks, Brian. Yes, today marks the premiere of The Roach Supremacy, the much anticipated sequel to The Roach Ultimatum, and if you loved that film you will certainly love this one as well since the producers evidently decided that the last one was so successful, they ought to remake it, and so they did—there is basically no difference between this film and the previous Roach film except for the cities the producers used as background. The Roach Ultimatum was set in Vienna, London, and Prague; The Roach Supremacy is set in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Jakarta. At least, the producers say they filmed in Jakarta—the longer I watched this movie the more I kept thinking that the Jakarta portion of the film was really the 1982 Mel Gibson film, The Year of Living Dangerously, with the new crop of actors digitally inserted. Hey, I’m all for Hollywood saving a buck or two here and there, but there is such a thing as overdoing it.

As for the plot, you have to ask: why bother? Tom Blattidae stars once again as Roach, the amnesiac insect secret agent who knows more ways to kill you than you know how to die but can’t remember his real name or where he left his car keys last night. I don’t know why Tom Blattidae chose to come back for the sequel and in a way, he didn’t; as far as I can tell, he phoned this performance in from whatever hole in the wall he's hiding from the paparazzi in this week. The movie begins with Roach trapped once again in a seedy roach motel, and is there any other kind of roach motel in these bug genre movies, fighting off a small army of Japanese assassin bugs who want to kill him. Why? They don’t know, and neither does Roach, and neither do I, and I stayed to the end of the film, unlike most of the audience, which decamped about halfway through this clunker to the auditorium next door to check out the newest remake of Pride and Prejudice starring Olive Oyl as Elizabeth Bennett and Popeye the Sailorman as Mr. Darcy.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a super-secret CIA elimination squad and their attempts to kill Roach, whom they regard as a rogue bug. In a film dedicated to the scarcely believable, the rapper Mosca Def plays Phly, the head of this super secret detail, who for reasons best known to himself is rarely seen without a rolled-up newspaper in one hand just waiting for an opportunity to hit something with it. Why is he doing this? It’s a mystery to me and it will be to you too, but apparently Roach is having bad dreams about his secret agent training in Poughkeepsie, of all places, and the CIA doesn’t want him to put two and two together. There’s not much chance of that happening in this stunningly bad film, which involves Roach skittering pointlessly across half a dozen impossibly clean floors while trying to stay one step ahead of the assassin bugs and the praying mantises—there is a subplot involving the Vatican, which, someone should point out to the producers of this film, is located in Rome and has been for centuries, and not in Hong Kong or anywhere near Hong Kong—and saving the world from a suicide bombardier beetle with a thermonuclear device surgically implanted in its body. Don’t ask, it’s better if you don’t know the gruesome details.

The film has all the usual distractions to keep the audience from thinking about the plot too much and there is even Vanessa Cardui reprising her role as Roach’s hooker with a heart of gold girlfriend, but she gets killed in the first half hour of the film; I suspect that Miss Cardui, a lovely and talented actress with a bright future in Hollywood, read the second thirty pages of the script while on the set and decided to get out of this bomb with her career intact while she still had time. Tom Blattidae apparently didn’t have that option in his contract; he had to stay for the whole thing and so did I, and I advise you not to bother. The Roach Supremacy? Not likely. Step on it a couple of times and make sure it’s dead. This is Todd Talbot. Brian?

[cut to anchorman]

Anchorman: So you didn’t like it, Todd?

Film critic: That may well be the understatement of the year, Brian.

[anchorman gives another phony chortle; turns to camera]

Anchorman: That’s the news for tonight. Stay tuned here for a special investigative report on the effects of steroids on zebra mussels; are your children at risk? For all of us here at the news desk, thank you for watching and good night.

[dramatic music swells like the anchorman’s ego after winning an Emmy. Fade to black. Commercial begins.]

DON'T DO THE CRIME BLUES: If you are one of those very shallow people who reads the newspaper every day in order to be a better informed citizen of this our Great Republic then in all likelihood you missed this bit of news from the police beat. Just the other day a robber passed a note to a teller in a California bank stating that he had a weapon and demanding money. The teller gave the thief the money and the miscreant promptly fled. It was not until the police arrived and gathered the available evidence, in this case, the hold up note, that the investigators realized that the note was, in fact, a personal check with the robber’s name printed on the front. The robber, to be sure, knew that his note had name issues; he attempted to throw the forces of law and order off the trail by blanking his name out with magic marker, but this stratagem was ineffective, to put it mildly. The FBI arrested the man at his home soon afterwards, a task made easier by the address printed under his name. Reading about this sort of thing does make you wonder what in the Sam Hill is happening to bank robbers in this country. While this particular heist is a slight improvement over the knucklehead in the line-up of bank robbery suspects who, when ordered to say, Put your hands in the air, this is a stick-up, objected vociferously, stating that he hadn’t said anything like that at all, it’s not that much of an improvement. Bank robbery in this country is, in fact, in a parlous state.

Bank robbery was once the signature American crime, the crime every true red, white, and blue loving hoodlum dreamed of committing. In the 19th century Jesse James robbed banks, as did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, setting a standard for high risk pilfering scarcely reached since. In our own time, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson all made themselves legends committing bank robberies; Bonnie and Clyde even had a classic movie made about them and their thieving ways, the eponymous film having very little to do with the truth, as is standard in Hollywood. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty were much better looking than the originals and the psychotic duo’s total take from all their robberies didn’t add up to what Al Capone spent on ties in a month, but that didn’t matter: they were bank robbers. Later in the century, Willie Sutton summed it up best: he robbed banks, he said, because that’s where the money was.

And it was fun rooting for the bank robbers, too, especially if you weren’t anywhere near the bank when they rolled into town looking for an easy score. During the Depression, desperate dirt farmers in Oklahoma cheered Pretty Boy Floyd on, knowing that he’d not only take the bank’s money, he’d burn all the mortgage papers and foreclosure notices and any other records that would make it easier for the bank to run you off your land. Watching a fellow Okie take the bank down a peg made a lot of poor folks feel better about themselves and their situation. After the Depression, people cheered Willie Sutton on, first, because he rarely used violence, and second, with the arrival of federal deposit insurance, no one had to worry about their life savings disappearing into someone’s pillow case and out the door into a waiting car; it’s easy to cheer for the bank robber when you know the money in your account is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. It’s like getting free lottery tickets for your birthday: you have a sporting interest, but no real involvement, not like you’d just sold your children’s kidneys, mortgaged the house, dropped the wife off the back of a train, and then spent the money trying to win the MegaMillion Dollar jackpot.

Since Sutton’s heyday, however, bank robbery has fallen on hard times. The number of bank robberies has gone down, of course, due to the baleful influence of the FBI, but the bank robbers left on the street these days are a fairly pedestrian crew, pulling their jobs without any of the panache that marked earlier generations of American hold-up artists. This has had an unfortunate effect on the nation’s young people. More and more kids want to be dope pushers when they grow up these days, and now, and I blame this on rap and the hip-hop culture so prevalent amongst the young today, there is a sudden surge of interest in pimping as a criminal career, something the bank robbers of an earlier era would have turned their noses up at, even as a last resort. Most of them would have gone straight first before relying on working girls for their ill-gotten pelf. Some filthy lucre was just too filthy for any self-respecting thug to take. That pandering is even a career option these days shows just how far the standards have fallen since the halcyon days of the great bandits.

What then to do about resuscitating the great American crime from its current doldrums? I have heard a great many suggestions, some more nonsensical that others, to tell the truth, but it seems to me that educating our young people is the key to preserving this once great felony from the misuse it has fallen into over the past few years. This, coupled with removing banks from shopping malls, supermarkets, and eliminating ATM machines, followed by a return to traditional bank architecture, will raise bank robbery to the status it once enjoyed throughout the nation. No one robs banks anymore because in the rush to make banking easier for everyone no one thought of its impact on hoods, thugs, and other assorted riff-raff. A gang of bank robbers going into an old-fashioned bank, an institution that breathed respectability, rectitude, and the Republican Party, a building built like a castle on the Rhine, was making a statement about their willingness to challenge the odds and dare criminal greatness; a gang of bank robbers hitting a bank in your local Shop-Rite, Kroger’s, or Winn-Dixie are just being slobs who’ll probably be caught as they try to get a double decaf latte with no sugar at the Starbucks concession. This is the sort of thing that depresses many people who keep track of this sort of thing. I mean, really, if the criminal element refuses to maintain high occupational standards, even in the face of the FBI’s constant harassment, then what hope can there be for the rest of society?

WHAT GETS US IN THE END: "But in focusing entirely on blood sugar, [he] ended up neglecting the most important treatment for saving lives — lowering the cholesterol level. That protects against heart disease, which eventually kills nearly everyone with diabetes." --The New York Times, 20 August 2007.

Well, that certainly removes takes a bit of the mystery out of being stuck with this damn thing, doesn’t it?

CAMPAIGN POSITIONS: Unlike many Democrats, I don’t think about politics morning, noon, and night, even if I am running for my party’s nomination in 2060. This shocks many of my fellow Democrats, for whom politics is not merely a way of wrapping peculation in a sugary but otherwise wholesome covering of chocolate and patriotism, but provides a reason for existence itself. I suppose that one of the benefits of the long 2060 election cycle is that, on occasion, I and my fellow candidates for the nomination get a chance to do other things, like go with the family to the beach, see a movie, or read the paper with some other motive than to see how we’re doing in the polls (I am not doing so well, but I ascribe this to the New York Times’ ongoing embargo of news concerning my candidacy). This is certainly useful for any Presidential candidate; it gives a view of the country and the world that we would otherwise lose amid the constant pressure of campaigning, speechmaking, and reading position papers, campaign strategy memos, and the ingredients on the sides of cereal boxes. Sometimes this down time will even lead to a startling moment of discovery or even provide an idea that might help the campaign. In that case, it is best to strike while the iron is hot, as the old saw has it, and declare your support of the idea before any of your opponents gets to it first and has the sheer unmitigated gall (just for the sake of curiosity, is there such a thing as mitigated gall? If there is, I have not heard of it, but then I lead a very sheltered life) to swipe the idea right out from underneath your nose.

So it was just the other day, when I read in the paper that the government of the People’s Republic of China announced that it and not the Dalai Lama will decide all questions resulting from the unfortunate tendency of certain deceased Tibetan religious leaders to reincarnate themselves in areas outside the reach of the Chinese secret police and most debt collection agencies. This causes the Chinese government no end of distress, as the deceased lama almost invariably leaves a house full of stuff for someone else to sort through and leads the impartial observer inevitably to the suspicion that the lamas have found a somewhat offbeat way of not paying their income taxes. That the government of the People’s Republic does not officially believe in reincarnation in particular or religion in general makes little difference; that government does not really believe in its own founding ideology, either, and seems to be getting on quite well without it, thank you very much. Whatever its ideology, however, the Chinese government insists on its right to control the lives of its citizens, no matter which life they happen to be in at the moment.

I was gobsmacked. The sheer brilliance of the idea stunned me when I first read it, and it stuns me even now that no Democrat has had the wit to see this simple solution to many of the pressing social needs of our time. Therefore, let me be the first Democrat to announce that I fully support government regulation of reincarnation and the equitable redistribution of good karma to those who have had to do without it for much too long. That this is necessary for the long range social health of this our Great Republic is so obvious that it should not require explanation, but let me just say that the centerpiece of any effort to make reincarnation more fair is the need to remove karma from the chaotic effects of the free market. Karma, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, is the Buddhist tenet that what you do in this life governs what happens to you in your next life. A good life begets good karma and hence an even better next life, while an evil life brings suffering and pain in your next incarnation. The whole objective of this cycle of life, suffering, death, and rebirth is the eventual extinction of the individual consciousness in Nirvana, or the E Street Band, if you’re my age, either one being a state of perfect bliss. There are even some great souls who, although entitled to enter this state of perfect bliss, do not, preferring to remain in the cycle of life and death in order to help their fellow human beings reach Nirvana. These great souls are the bodhisattvas, and it is their role that the Chinese government now insists on assuming.

Let me reiterate something here: I do not understand why no Democrat has ever come out in favor of this idea before. Clearly, if we, as Democrats, want to make life more fair and equitable for the great mass of our fellow Americans, which, as Democrats, surely we must, then we must reform the current unfair system of apportioning karma in this country. Relying on the free market and the occasional bodhisattva is no longer enough; the government must step in and regulate the market. Government regulation of karma and reincarnation assures, at long last, the equitable treatment everyone deserves. The bodhisattvas will, at last, be able to move into the eternal bliss of Nirvana that their good actions have earned for them, which has the added benefit of removing them from the scene in such a way that they will not be around to demand the accumulated Social Security checks the government owes them for all of their past lives.

There will be, no doubt about it, the usual carping from the Republicans, who will blather on about the free market and individual responsibility for their own karma and how Democrats are once again instituting another big expensive government bureaucracy without any idea of how the government intends to pay for it beyond jacking everyone’s taxes through the roof, but this, frankly, is just the sort of thing you can expect from a party dedicated to perpetuating societal inequities from one life to the next. Let’s take a look at the karmic free market: poverty and war are still with us, injustice and racism are still with us, the Boston Red Sox and their minions are still with us. Can anyone really say that the vagaries of unregulated karma have been beneficial to the broad spectrum of American citizens? I think we all know the answer to that question.

With government regulation of karma, it will finally be possible to tackle many of the social problems that have, for far too long, plagued our country. Racism will fall by the wayside when the government can guarantee our African American citizens that not only will the government guarantee their equality with white citizens in this life, it can even guarantee that in their next life they will be white as well, despite the bitter cries of reverse discrimination from people who have been white for at least their last five or six lives and have no intention of sharing the whiteness with others. Our traditional supporters in the labor movement will be happy to know that, when I am President, my administration will guarantee that no American worker will be reborn as an Indian or Chinese worker making less than the union wage and that the shameful outsourcing of American souls to foreign countries will cease on the first day of my Presidency. I pledge to all Americans right here and right now: no American will be reborn as a foreigner unless that is their choice and that I will strive to amend the Constitution so that all persons born in the United States shall be reborn in the United States. And I will make sure that the teachers’ unions that there will be more money for teachers and smaller class sizes as well; it has nothing really to do with karma—it’s what they always want and so supporting this is a no-brainer, even if by 2060 class sizes should be so small that there’s no one actually in the classroom.

In any case, regulating karma will lead to a golden age in this country, and provided we can keep control of Congress and the Presidency, for the Democratic Party too; if we can control the bureaucracy that regulates the outflow of karma, we can create enough Democratic voters to keep us in the majority for a very long time to come. It’s not every presidential candidate who can tell his party that if you vote for me in 2060, I will guarantee our party wins the Presidency in 2160 and 2260 and so on and so forth. This was a wonderful idea, even if it was Made in China, and I think we ought to do something about it before anyone can get good karma down at Wal-Mart.

AMNESTY: I’ll be honest with you—I’ve always been of two minds when it comes to the issue of immigration. I suppose that this ambivalence on my part could hardly be otherwise: my paternal grandparents were immigrants to this our Great Republic, as is my mother; and I’ve always had the feeling that there was something more than a little hypocritical about my saying, okay, the Clan Bashmachkin has arrived, thanks be to God, you guys can lift the drawbridge now and keep out the rest of the riff-raff. On the other hand, my mother and grandparents didn’t sneak over the border or jump off the boat when no one was looking; they came to this country legally, after having had to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops and legal twists the warped and malevolent genius of the United States government could devise, a process that makes more than one poor immigrant coming to this, the Land of Opportunity, wonder if they were actually going to America or booking passage for a one way, no expenses paid, five day and twelve night trip into one of the less traveled byways of the Twilight Zone instead. Complaining about the immigration bureaucracy is something many immigrant families do on a more or less constant basis; in fact, we often complain about the immigration bureaucracy for fun and recreation, and now that there are more immigrants in the country than ever before, I am surprised that someone hasn’t started a professional sports league dedicated to complaining about the immigration bureaucracy. The best complainers could meet on the tarmac at JFK in a final ten hour, best of five complain-a-thon to determine the champion of champion complainers, with the smiling immigration people standing nearby to congratulate the winner at the end of his ordeal and then immediately deport his ungrateful ass back to whatever stinking war-torn Third World hellhole he came from in the first place. That’ll teach him to whine, dammit!

Which leads inevitably, as many things are wont to do in our modern age, to Albert Einstein, who, I think we can all agree, was a lot smarter than any five of us put together ever will be and don’t you ever forget it, buster. Albert Einstein was, like Mom and my grandparents, an immigrant to these shores, coming here in 1933, having figured out, years before anyone else did and without the use of a crystal ball or any other artificial ingredients, that Adolf Hitler was a major league loon who liked to start really big wars when he wasn’t busy chasing Eva Braun around the vegetarian buffet counter in the Fuhrerbunker’s cafeteria. Einstein didn’t like wars, big or otherwise, nor did he like wearing socks, which he found irrational, and he was a man, in the words of the late Abba Eban, devoted, in all things, to rationality. The opposite of rationality is irrationality, insanity, or Congress, as it is sometimes called, which now proposes to provide amnesty to the several million immigrants who now reside in this country without the legal blessing of the government. Congress, for reasons best known to itself, does not want to call the amnesty they want to provide an amnesty and so in the interests of fairness, I won’t either. The economist and Carter Administration inflation czar Alfred Kahn used the banana to describe depressions, so let’s call our not-amnesty a loganberry instead. Loganberries are a noble fruit, bred originally by a federal judge who clearly had too much time on his hands. Now, as I understand it, France and Spain have already tried loganberries and found that instead of slowing the rate of illegal immigration (I haven’t thought of a fruit for this term, but I will shortly) loganberries actually increased the rate, since everyone back in their corner of hell’s little half-acre figured that if the French and Spanish handed out loganberries once, they’d have to do it again. In fact, back in 1986, when there were only three million illegal immigrants in this country, the Simpson—Mazzoli loganberry was supposed to stop the tide once and for all; everyone who was already here could stay, but no one else would be allowed in. That’s it; we were finally getting tough. Twenty-one years and about fifteen million illegal immigrants later, Congress is about to do the same thing all over again. Given, as Einstein once put it, that one definition of insanity is the performance of the same action over and over again in anticipation of a different result, what makes Congress think that this time will be any different than the last time?