April 01, 2005
A Little Help From Your "Friends"
A Late Inaugural Present
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.
You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?BUSH: I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.
John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could've done it better this way or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet.
Everyone Makes Mistakes
I've a special secret children ought to know;
It's about the little mistakes you make as you begin to grow
If you make a mistake, you shouldn't start to cry.
Mistakes are not so bad, and here is why:
Oh everyone makes mistakes.
Oh, yes they do
Your sister and your brother and your dad and mother too;
Big people, small people, matter of fact, all people!
Everyone makes mistakes, so why can't you?
If you make a mistake while counting to ten,
Well don't get mad and don't be sad;
Just start to count again.
And if you should only get to eight or nine,
I'm still your friend and I still like you fine,
'Cause everyone makes mistakes.
Oh, yes they do
Your sister and your brother and your dad and mother too;
Big people, small people, matter of fact, all people!
Everyone makes mistakes, so why can't you?
If you spill a glass of milk all over the floor,
Well, your mom and dad still like you just as much as they did before,
'Cause when Mother and Dad were just as small as you,
I'll bet that they knocked their milk over too.
'Cause everyone makes mistakes.
Oh, yes they do
Your sister and your brother and your dad and mother too;
Big people, small people, matter of fact, all people!
Everyone makes mistakes, so why can't you?
If everyone in the whole wide world makes mistakes,
Then why can't you?
American Politics Leftish
Wow. What a sorry bunch. Really and honestly.The one thing you can at least say about the right wing collection of nitwits is that they can at least afford competent web designers. I haven’t seen such shoddily thrown together pages since I was into poking around in paranoid conspiracy theorists. All a bunch of these groups need is a psychotic shortwave radio show to complete the bill.
We’ll start with the group whose site offended me the least in terms of aesthetics and move on from there.
The Natural Law Party
The Natural Law Party like others on the right was founded in 1992 (Year of the Nut) and disbanded nationally in 2004, but I’m damned if I can find on their website a good explanation of what Natural Law means or stands for. The closest I can find from them is that they repetitiously talk about prevention. Prevent crime, prevent soaring health care costs, prevent costly medical problems, prevent abortion, prevent this and prevent that. They certainly go about preventing you from knowing what the hell Natural Law is.
Wikipedia tells me that this is the political arm of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and that they seek to resolve all the world’s problems through Transcendental Meditation. While I’m personally a believer in the value of meditation (or even just some quiet time for some people), I’m dubious that all the people of the world can be convinced that simply sitting down and repeating your mantra to yourself will resolve their gripes. It’s sort of like suggesting with a bit of Freudian psychoanalysis, Hitler wouldn’t have been such a nogoodnik, or that all al-Qaeda really wants is a hug and some acceptance. Let out a Primal Scream bin Laden, you’ll feel better, really.
I don’t want to unnecessarily knock on TM (I know at least one practitioner and love him dearly), but if that’s your number two idea for education reform, maybe you don’t have many ideas. When you get to defense, if your idea of preventing terrorism and war is to create a “prevention wing” of soldiers trained “in the proven peace-promoting technology of the TM-Sidhi program” then again maybe you might need to look deeper at the problems. Vietnam had a great deal of meditating monks who believed in peace and that didn’t stop America from stomping and shitting all over them.
The rest of their political belief system is very surface, very light. They never get into any nuts and bolts of policy, which is apparently the big flaw in all third party groups. There is a fixation on one little aspect of the problem with society. (See here, here, here, and oh yeah, here.) Never actually having their hands on any of the levers of power, they have absolutely fuck-all idea how to make it work. In economics, for instance, the Natural Law party believe in the magical pipe dream of a 10% flat tax that would somehow pay for everything in the budget (including my yogi?), which is plain ridiculous. They provide no statistical analysis to even come close to proving this bit of ignorant posturing. Lacking even the plodding sincerity of the Reform Party, they believe this simply because they do not know any better. They do not have the most elementary and basic grasp of how truly Byzantine government and its funding has become. They believe in Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot kinds of solutions and that’s not going to do it.
When part of your party’s website includes a long list of shows you’ve been on on television (“The Michael Reagan Talk Show”(!), “The Jim Bohannon Show,” (who?), “Larry King Live!” (who hasn’t?), then you know the jig is up. Real politicians are unimpressed with being on the TeeVee.
I will, however, give them credit for talking up the dangers of genetically enhanced foods. Of course, it’s for prevention’s sake, like everything else.
My god, can anyone make much distinction between any of this? Some want revolution and some want change from within the system. That’s about it. They all want universal health care (yay!), an end to sexism, racism, and other bigoted isms (yay! um, that is, yay for getting rid of them), and some are Trotskyites and some are not. I tried to get a good view at all of them to help you out here, dear readers, but really. Come on, man. These groups should all just band together and stop splintering into smaller and smaller factions based on who did and who didn’t read all the footnotes in the third volume of Kapital. Can’t you see that’s what the running dog capitalist pigs want, comrades? Can’t you?
Damn, you guys helped institute the 40-hour workweek, the weekend, vacation time. You worked for a minimum wage when no one else did. You fought successfully to end child labor and to put those kids in schools. Don’t give up now. Remember the glory days of Eugene V. Debs and Thomas? Kee-rist, but you could have that again. Hook up with the Greens while you’re at it.
The Green Party
The world’s best known spoiler party in the United States, the Greens insanely bought into the same wacky dream moderate Republicans deluded themselves with in 2000 — namely the notion that George W. Bush isn’t crazy batshit insane — and they fielded Ralph Nader as their presidential candidate. He was harmless in 1996 when he truly should have put a lot of money into the race (because let’s face it, Bob Dole couldn’t have won that election if he’d been mainlining Viagra right into his dick) and ginned up the party’s 5% turnout so they could get matching federal funds.
And what can we say about Ralph anymore? The man has clearly decided now is as good a time as any to take a shit on his entire, fantastic career. He’s quit helping people in order to help Bush. You have to hand it to someone who believes that even though they have less a chance of being president than Bob Dole (and probably me, for that matter), that it is important they run anyway. You have to just in some small corner of your heart, even though you’ve lost every ounce of respect for the person, admire that sheer insane gusto that would lead you down the path to helping to power those who would dismantle everything you’ve ever stood for. It’s chutzpah all right. Or stupidity. I forget which. And for an added dollop of dramatic irony, for those who like that kind of thing, a President Al Gore would have been the most environmentalist president in the history of the US, and would almost definitely never lead us into the shitpile that is Iraq. Way to go there, Ralphie boy. Way to go.
As an American outgrowth of the European Greens (actually a real political power), The Green Party USA (not a real political power) can, at best, like most third parties, field a city council candidate here, a mayor there, maybe even a state representative. They are like a well-organized club. I probably don’t have to tell you the kinds of things they stand for — hint, it’s the environment. Earnest do-gooders who only want to make the world a better place with cleaner air, cleaner water, green spaces for children to play in, saved rainforests, and an end to whaling, the Green Party will never get a chance to enact any of this. Oh, I’m not saying it won’t come about. I’m just saying it’s better to be in the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. Save a widespread environmental catastrophe along the lines of The Day After Tomorrow, society is just going to limp along.
The Light Party
I saved the best for last.
Okay, this is unfair to put over on the left side of things, because as the home page tells us: “THE LIGHT PARTY, a wholistic [sic] proactive, new political paradigm party, is a synthesis of the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian and Green Parties... We have formulated a inspired, practical, synergistic, 7-point WIN-WIN program which serves to successfully resolve our current national and global socio-economic and ecological challenges.”
What can you say to that? They got it all, a little something for everyone — except, of course, the Nazis. Their health plan will, no shit, provide you with “Freedom From Dis-ease!” Cool. Camus and Sartre would be so down with that. Their tax plan, likewise, will rescue you from "TAX STRESS,” an apparent disorder so bad that only capital letters can clue you in to its evil. And how do they do this? Simple “TAX MONEY NOT PEOPLE.” Gotcha. I sure can’t wait to stop sending bits of myself to the federal government. I mean, it’s cool and all that hair clippings and nail trimmings and such can help out and it’s a tax I don’t mind paying in lieu of money, I’ve just never been sure what’s done with it all. Thank you, Light Party.
They “support the conscious use of technology in creating A Sustainable Global Solar Hydrogen/Hemp Based Economy” because, you know, a major bit of trouble we’ve been experiencing is unconscious bong usage. With a little consciousness, dude, we’d be set. I’m pretty sure some fairly unconscious bong power went into the website/platform which reads like it was written by a stoned high schooler with poor grammar skills. Sudden and promiscuous capitalization, run on sentences, meandering paragraphs, so much odd ellipses it’d make Celine’s head spin. These are not the kind of things that inspire confidence in your abilities. Face it, dude, if you can’t tackle a paragraph, what makes you think I’d be willing to let you try something harder. Just look at the fuckwit in the Oval Office now. What a mess.
But Da Vid, the founder of the Light Party and write in candidate for President, has a second gig in case that Pennsylvania Avenue thing doesn’t work out. He’s big into Artainment. What’s Artainment, you ask. Good fucking question. “Artainment is a magnificent and definitive demonstration of the conscious use of technology for the advancement of human evolution,” Da Vid tells us in his understated, modest way. If you were among the lucky, back in1992, when, yes, all bad recent ideas got started, you got to experience “a ‘Cosmic Celebration’ at the Palladium in New York City, where we premiered live music with six hours of Artainment.”
Six hours. Six fucking hours. Wherein you can experience the Metacube. The Metacube, dude! If you want to know more, just go visit the website. You can also download and listen to music along the lines of “THE VENUS TRANSIT: A Mystical Love Experience” and “I Am Declaring Peace.” This is the kind of echoey vocals and acoustic guitar that gives folk music a bad name. I suppose there could be vastly worse presidents than a goony looking New Age folkie with coo-coo-ca-choo ideas, hell there already has been. I just don’t see myself voting for anyone named Da Vid.
So in short, the difference between the left and right third parties comes down to one thing. Money. The right’s got it, the left don’t. For political neophytes, large amounts of cash can suddenly lend whatever crackbrained notion you have, like a flat tax, instant prestige and credence. Without the deep pockets of scumbag donors like Richard Melon Scaife, the Coors family (their second big sin after putting out that pisswater and calling it beer, I haven’t figured out which is the bigger sin against humanity) and the John M. Olin Foundation, the left fringe remains a harmless little sideshow who drum up cash through NORML rallies, badly written and badly printed workers newsletters, and craptacular New Age music, which apparently is given away for free. Great fundraiser, guys!
If this leaves you hopeless, just remember, society may lurch rightward on occasion, but time always pulls you to the left. Think, just fifty years ago, hell, less, lynchings happened around once a week. Things get better every decade, maybe not every year, but with every decade. We’ll get there, just you wait and see.
We’ll start with the group whose site offended me the least in terms of aesthetics and move on from there.
The Natural Law Party
The Natural Law Party like others on the right was founded in 1992 (Year of the Nut) and disbanded nationally in 2004, but I’m damned if I can find on their website a good explanation of what Natural Law means or stands for. The closest I can find from them is that they repetitiously talk about prevention. Prevent crime, prevent soaring health care costs, prevent costly medical problems, prevent abortion, prevent this and prevent that. They certainly go about preventing you from knowing what the hell Natural Law is.
Wikipedia tells me that this is the political arm of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and that they seek to resolve all the world’s problems through Transcendental Meditation. While I’m personally a believer in the value of meditation (or even just some quiet time for some people), I’m dubious that all the people of the world can be convinced that simply sitting down and repeating your mantra to yourself will resolve their gripes. It’s sort of like suggesting with a bit of Freudian psychoanalysis, Hitler wouldn’t have been such a nogoodnik, or that all al-Qaeda really wants is a hug and some acceptance. Let out a Primal Scream bin Laden, you’ll feel better, really.
I don’t want to unnecessarily knock on TM (I know at least one practitioner and love him dearly), but if that’s your number two idea for education reform, maybe you don’t have many ideas. When you get to defense, if your idea of preventing terrorism and war is to create a “prevention wing” of soldiers trained “in the proven peace-promoting technology of the TM-Sidhi program” then again maybe you might need to look deeper at the problems. Vietnam had a great deal of meditating monks who believed in peace and that didn’t stop America from stomping and shitting all over them.
The rest of their political belief system is very surface, very light. They never get into any nuts and bolts of policy, which is apparently the big flaw in all third party groups. There is a fixation on one little aspect of the problem with society. (See here, here, here, and oh yeah, here.) Never actually having their hands on any of the levers of power, they have absolutely fuck-all idea how to make it work. In economics, for instance, the Natural Law party believe in the magical pipe dream of a 10% flat tax that would somehow pay for everything in the budget (including my yogi?), which is plain ridiculous. They provide no statistical analysis to even come close to proving this bit of ignorant posturing. Lacking even the plodding sincerity of the Reform Party, they believe this simply because they do not know any better. They do not have the most elementary and basic grasp of how truly Byzantine government and its funding has become. They believe in Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot kinds of solutions and that’s not going to do it.
When part of your party’s website includes a long list of shows you’ve been on on television (“The Michael Reagan Talk Show”(!), “The Jim Bohannon Show,” (who?), “Larry King Live!” (who hasn’t?), then you know the jig is up. Real politicians are unimpressed with being on the TeeVee.
I will, however, give them credit for talking up the dangers of genetically enhanced foods. Of course, it’s for prevention’s sake, like everything else.
- The Socialist Party USA
- Workers Party
- Workers World Party
- Socialist Action
- Socialist Equality Party
- Socialist Labor Party
- Socialist Workers Party
My god, can anyone make much distinction between any of this? Some want revolution and some want change from within the system. That’s about it. They all want universal health care (yay!), an end to sexism, racism, and other bigoted isms (yay! um, that is, yay for getting rid of them), and some are Trotskyites and some are not. I tried to get a good view at all of them to help you out here, dear readers, but really. Come on, man. These groups should all just band together and stop splintering into smaller and smaller factions based on who did and who didn’t read all the footnotes in the third volume of Kapital. Can’t you see that’s what the running dog capitalist pigs want, comrades? Can’t you?
Damn, you guys helped institute the 40-hour workweek, the weekend, vacation time. You worked for a minimum wage when no one else did. You fought successfully to end child labor and to put those kids in schools. Don’t give up now. Remember the glory days of Eugene V. Debs and Thomas? Kee-rist, but you could have that again. Hook up with the Greens while you’re at it.
The Green Party
The world’s best known spoiler party in the United States, the Greens insanely bought into the same wacky dream moderate Republicans deluded themselves with in 2000 — namely the notion that George W. Bush isn’t crazy batshit insane — and they fielded Ralph Nader as their presidential candidate. He was harmless in 1996 when he truly should have put a lot of money into the race (because let’s face it, Bob Dole couldn’t have won that election if he’d been mainlining Viagra right into his dick) and ginned up the party’s 5% turnout so they could get matching federal funds.
And what can we say about Ralph anymore? The man has clearly decided now is as good a time as any to take a shit on his entire, fantastic career. He’s quit helping people in order to help Bush. You have to hand it to someone who believes that even though they have less a chance of being president than Bob Dole (and probably me, for that matter), that it is important they run anyway. You have to just in some small corner of your heart, even though you’ve lost every ounce of respect for the person, admire that sheer insane gusto that would lead you down the path to helping to power those who would dismantle everything you’ve ever stood for. It’s chutzpah all right. Or stupidity. I forget which. And for an added dollop of dramatic irony, for those who like that kind of thing, a President Al Gore would have been the most environmentalist president in the history of the US, and would almost definitely never lead us into the shitpile that is Iraq. Way to go there, Ralphie boy. Way to go.
As an American outgrowth of the European Greens (actually a real political power), The Green Party USA (not a real political power) can, at best, like most third parties, field a city council candidate here, a mayor there, maybe even a state representative. They are like a well-organized club. I probably don’t have to tell you the kinds of things they stand for — hint, it’s the environment. Earnest do-gooders who only want to make the world a better place with cleaner air, cleaner water, green spaces for children to play in, saved rainforests, and an end to whaling, the Green Party will never get a chance to enact any of this. Oh, I’m not saying it won’t come about. I’m just saying it’s better to be in the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. Save a widespread environmental catastrophe along the lines of The Day After Tomorrow, society is just going to limp along.
The Light Party
I saved the best for last.
Okay, this is unfair to put over on the left side of things, because as the home page tells us: “THE LIGHT PARTY, a wholistic [sic] proactive, new political paradigm party, is a synthesis of the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian and Green Parties... We have formulated a inspired, practical, synergistic, 7-point WIN-WIN program which serves to successfully resolve our current national and global socio-economic and ecological challenges.”
What can you say to that? They got it all, a little something for everyone — except, of course, the Nazis. Their health plan will, no shit, provide you with “Freedom From Dis-ease!” Cool. Camus and Sartre would be so down with that. Their tax plan, likewise, will rescue you from "TAX STRESS,” an apparent disorder so bad that only capital letters can clue you in to its evil. And how do they do this? Simple “TAX MONEY NOT PEOPLE.” Gotcha. I sure can’t wait to stop sending bits of myself to the federal government. I mean, it’s cool and all that hair clippings and nail trimmings and such can help out and it’s a tax I don’t mind paying in lieu of money, I’ve just never been sure what’s done with it all. Thank you, Light Party.
They “support the conscious use of technology in creating A Sustainable Global Solar Hydrogen/Hemp Based Economy” because, you know, a major bit of trouble we’ve been experiencing is unconscious bong usage. With a little consciousness, dude, we’d be set. I’m pretty sure some fairly unconscious bong power went into the website/platform which reads like it was written by a stoned high schooler with poor grammar skills. Sudden and promiscuous capitalization, run on sentences, meandering paragraphs, so much odd ellipses it’d make Celine’s head spin. These are not the kind of things that inspire confidence in your abilities. Face it, dude, if you can’t tackle a paragraph, what makes you think I’d be willing to let you try something harder. Just look at the fuckwit in the Oval Office now. What a mess.
But Da Vid, the founder of the Light Party and write in candidate for President, has a second gig in case that Pennsylvania Avenue thing doesn’t work out. He’s big into Artainment. What’s Artainment, you ask. Good fucking question. “Artainment is a magnificent and definitive demonstration of the conscious use of technology for the advancement of human evolution,” Da Vid tells us in his understated, modest way. If you were among the lucky, back in1992, when, yes, all bad recent ideas got started, you got to experience “a ‘Cosmic Celebration’ at the Palladium in New York City, where we premiered live music with six hours of Artainment.”
Six hours. Six fucking hours. Wherein you can experience the Metacube. The Metacube, dude! If you want to know more, just go visit the website. You can also download and listen to music along the lines of “THE VENUS TRANSIT: A Mystical Love Experience” and “I Am Declaring Peace.” This is the kind of echoey vocals and acoustic guitar that gives folk music a bad name. I suppose there could be vastly worse presidents than a goony looking New Age folkie with coo-coo-ca-choo ideas, hell there already has been. I just don’t see myself voting for anyone named Da Vid.
So in short, the difference between the left and right third parties comes down to one thing. Money. The right’s got it, the left don’t. For political neophytes, large amounts of cash can suddenly lend whatever crackbrained notion you have, like a flat tax, instant prestige and credence. Without the deep pockets of scumbag donors like Richard Melon Scaife, the Coors family (their second big sin after putting out that pisswater and calling it beer, I haven’t figured out which is the bigger sin against humanity) and the John M. Olin Foundation, the left fringe remains a harmless little sideshow who drum up cash through NORML rallies, badly written and badly printed workers newsletters, and craptacular New Age music, which apparently is given away for free. Great fundraiser, guys!
If this leaves you hopeless, just remember, society may lurch rightward on occasion, but time always pulls you to the left. Think, just fifty years ago, hell, less, lynchings happened around once a week. Things get better every decade, maybe not every year, but with every decade. We’ll get there, just you wait and see.
American Politics Rightish
Politics in America is essentially like politics everywhere. You have what’s commonly described as two wings, a left and a right, and that spectrum is divided and subdivided, the phylum subdivided into class and order and family all the way down to the nubbin. What you’re ultimately left with is quasi-autonomous, affiliated collectives of two people who lean one way or the other. It’s a bit like sex: ridiculous, embarrassing, and filled with absurd postures, strange bedfellows, and royal screwings — but ultimately necessary.
Regarding that submicroatomic division aspect, this survey of the right and the rightish is nowhere near definitive, but I thought I would take a look at some of the other parties in at least one of the shadows of the Big Two. I may occasionally be dissatisfied with my own party, but there are enough wackjob “legitimate” political parties out there that I can sleep comfortably knowing they will never get closer to the reins of power than spanking their piddly doggies.
First up is the Constitution Party, a collection of retromingent wankers to beat the band. This fringe freakshow was originally formed in 1992 as a group called the US Taxpayers Party, so right away you can guess what their priority is. Only it’s not. Essentially, if you removed all the happy happy joy joy talk from Republican PR spinners, this is what you’d get. The GOP without the smoke and mirrors.
With no fear of ever having to be taken seriously by any significant portion of the population, the Constitution Party gives you a good look at festering rightwing bullyboy cowardice, Bible thumping poltroonery, and pleonexia in all its unadorned glory. Their website cuts straight to the scum. Right after their platform’s preamble they launch into outlawing abortion, even in the case of rape and incest. For a group that got started as a tax-dodger hang out, they sure went straight to the nutjob row.
Claiming that the wish to “restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations,” and “to restore our government to its Constitutional limits,” these ignoramuses are ahistorical crackpots of the first order. Several items on their platform are repeals of Amendments to the Constitution, arguing circuitously to the idea that Amendments themselves were somehow unconstitutional. Uh, no, dipshits.
Anyone care to guess what kind of governmental acts (other than Roe v. Wade) these Mensa Reject rejects find most compelling of their fervor? If you guessed civil rights for minorities, you win the big fat homophobe special phallic cigar. “Criminal penalties should apply to those [who] place members of the public at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS,” they inform us, and they also want you to know in no uncertain terms that they are against gay marriage, gay adoption, gay rights, gay cars, gay fashion shows, gay dogs, and gay gays. Methinks you doth protest too much, ladies.
Also on their list is the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, more commonly known as the Civil Rights Act, which disallowed literacy tests, poll taxes, and other means to keep blacks from voting. And the repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, which allows for direct, popular election of Senators as opposed to election by state legislatures. They want the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US. And they’re against statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. Why? They never say, but I suspect it’s because 50 is a cooler number than 51 or 52 (or alternately you could argue that both places are filled with non-honkies). Since they believe statehood is voluntary, they make no provision for D.C. becoming a state if Alabama decides to opt out.
Orwellian language is on high display herein as well. One should always be concerned about a political party who tells us they are “opposed to any New World Order,” claiming to be against to military adventurism abroad while itching for us to take back the Panama Canal. My favorite item was this truly mind-wrenching bit of self-contradiction: “We call on our local, state and federal governments to uphold our cherished First Amendment right to free speech by vigorously enforcing our laws against obscenity.” Got that? We will protect free speech by taking it away, Mr. Potty-Mouth.
White, reactionary, racist, and stupid as all get out, The Constitution Party represents everything the Republican Party would like to have the guts to be. Inch by craven inch, though, they’re working their way there.
The Reform Party
The shell of a party since the absence of founding ding-a-ling, H. Ross Perot, the Reform Party had only two other marquis name on their list — embarrassing former pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura, a red diaper gorilla baby with cop dillhole mustachio, before he too bolted to form his Independence Party, and the terminally, beligerently stupid Pat Buchanan. Having shifted to the right (for Pat) only to fragment into a thousand splinters, this squirt of a party has creaked back toward centrist positions after shedding the shitbags. Inspired by their businessman forefather, the Reform Party’s platform is heavy on the bullet points, everything set up to be copied and pasted into a PowerPoint presentation from hell. This means reading their plans for America is dull, dull, dull. That alone should be grounds to keep them out of power.
Actually, I’m being too cruel to the new husk of a Reform Party, which seems genuinely interested in reform — as their name covertly suggests. They’re supposedly pro-labor, pro-environment, for a balanced budget (too restrictively in my opinion, sometimes you gotta spend to the red, baby), and they have a kinder, gentler version of the Constitution Party’s anti-immigrant stance. Not quite understanding Social Security, they want to phase it out and replace it with a remarkably similar pension program. There’s a kind of endearing, apple-cheeked sincerity in their platform that is just too cute to mock too hard. For example, in writing about taxes, they write:
Get that? They will create a new tax system, simple and fair, to pay for our country’s bills, and we’ll debate the best plans even letting the voters in on the discussion. Marvelous idea. Truly revolutionary. It’s like when you were in high school and your parents wanted to sit down and have you draw up a budget based on your Burger King paycheck and your car insurance and your gas and your clothes, and all that. Cute.
For more of their earnestness, they want ethics in government, and you know what that means. Yes, “no more free meals.” The problem with our country has been too many free chicken dinners for politicians, too many extra pancakes sneaked at those Sunday morning campaign church stops. This will end, by gum. I don’t doubt that gluttons bilk at every chance they get to strap on the feedbag, but I wonder if this is important enough to put in your top three ethic clean up ideas.
The Libertarian Party
Jesus what a bunch of wankers. The perpetual bitch of the Republican Party. Even more religious than the Constitution Party, this group slavers at the capitalist boot like nobody’s business and would lick Jack Welch’s tired old sphincter if they had half a chance. Their religion is “the free market,” their gospel texts are Ayn Rand, and their patron saint is Milton Friedman. A fairly humorless bunch, Libertarians react to negative comments about the free market as though you insulted somebody’s mama. Nothing matters to them more then cashola, though they use a logicalish argument to get them to it, putting the individual on a pedestal, then putting the individual’s property on top of him. They claim to believe in the sanctity of property, though none of them seem too keen on handing over their own yard to the Indians and packing it in to go back to Europe.
You could demonstrate in argument, with statistics, reams of graphs, and the incisions of laser-beam logic the pragmatic value of a restriction on corporations, oh let's say, dumping toxic chemicals in public waterways, and they’d still see the regulation as evil evil bad bad nasty. As deluded a bunch of suckers as I’ve ever come across in my lifetime, libertarianism used to be somewhat serious-minded about civil liberties first and foremost, but now they’ve devolved into, in the words of Berkeley Breathed, a bunch of “whining tax dodgers.”
What makes this batch of douchebags particularly pernicious is how easily duped they are by Republicans. Because the Republican Party has been traditionally the no taxes party (at least in theory, though not always, read my lips, in practice), they’ve managed to seduce Libertarians into throwing their lot in with them on occasion, baiting these suckers with the promise of a nice fat tax reduction and the disemboweling of Social Security. Once they’ve snagged the votes, Republicans have of late, gone about handing over the reins of many a decision to the kind of nutjobs who make up the Constitution Party. Suckers. And so, the window dressing of civil liberties that Libertarians take so much pride in showing off as though that were their primary consideration, gets shredded while the Libs get a few measly dollars each paycheck left in by the federal government, to be hoovered out by the state and local municipalities to cover their budget shortfalls. This is cyclical with the Libertarians, each time they get the promise that Trent Lott won’t cum in their mouths, each time they believe, each time they have to wipe off their chins and pick up the few coins Trent tosses on the floor. I’d call them dumb cunts if that weren’t an insult to cunts everywhere.
There are essentially two kinds of Libertarians. First are Libs for Life. These Randroid chumps will remain chumps forever, brashly claiming their independence from the two Big Parties, from compromise, and from relevance. They hypocritically use interstate highways, city sewage, the Big Gubmint created Internet, and any host of other services. Chumps this big go on to support screwballs like Michael Badnarik who is so anti-government he refuses to use the ZIP code.
The other kind is what I like to call Prepublicans, or Libertarian Until Graduation (these L.U.G.s should not be confused with Lesbians Until Graduation, though the concept is the same). Youthful experimenters, they will eventually embrace their inner authoritarian and join the GOP so they can get themselves a tax break. This will involve deals with the devil, handshakes with Reverend Dobson, and such, but boy oh boy what they’ll do with that tax break. An even dumber subset will refer to themselves as anarcho-capitalists in what is either the political equivalent of the genius ideas one can find while huffing paint thinner or the ravings of those who lack fundamental understanding of words and their definitions.
There are other rightwing nutjob parties out there one could mock, such as the Buchanan Brigade-run America First Party with losers like Bo Gritz; the American Independent Party — the Constitution Party with no money and even less appeal; the American Nazi Party — exactly what you think, people too braindead to even fit in with the above mentioned jackasses; the Christian Falangist Party, fascists apparently against the fascists in the Nazi Party; the Constitutional Action Party — dumb enough to make the Constitution Party look like geniuses; the Family Values Party, which while one could mistake it for the other religious fruitcake fascists, has the distinct claim of its founding member having spoken with God himself who “specifically told him to encourage people to stop paying taxes until the public funding of abortion ends;” and the Prohibition Party (what? They’re still out there?). Like I said, I could mock these fiddlestick-brains, but that would stretch this already long column to at least four times its length. There aren’t words enough for all the foolishness in the world, nor time enough had I started on Monday, Day One, when there was light, and it was good.
Tune in later for a look at the American Left where I’ll take a stick and poke at the vaguer distinctions between the Socialist Party USA, Socialist Action, Socialist Equality Party, Socialist Labor Party, the Social Democrats and the Democratic Socialists, and the Socialist Workers Party. Won’t that be fun? Like naming body hair.
Regarding that submicroatomic division aspect, this survey of the right and the rightish is nowhere near definitive, but I thought I would take a look at some of the other parties in at least one of the shadows of the Big Two. I may occasionally be dissatisfied with my own party, but there are enough wackjob “legitimate” political parties out there that I can sleep comfortably knowing they will never get closer to the reins of power than spanking their piddly doggies.
First up is the Constitution Party, a collection of retromingent wankers to beat the band. This fringe freakshow was originally formed in 1992 as a group called the US Taxpayers Party, so right away you can guess what their priority is. Only it’s not. Essentially, if you removed all the happy happy joy joy talk from Republican PR spinners, this is what you’d get. The GOP without the smoke and mirrors.
With no fear of ever having to be taken seriously by any significant portion of the population, the Constitution Party gives you a good look at festering rightwing bullyboy cowardice, Bible thumping poltroonery, and pleonexia in all its unadorned glory. Their website cuts straight to the scum. Right after their platform’s preamble they launch into outlawing abortion, even in the case of rape and incest. For a group that got started as a tax-dodger hang out, they sure went straight to the nutjob row.
Claiming that the wish to “restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations,” and “to restore our government to its Constitutional limits,” these ignoramuses are ahistorical crackpots of the first order. Several items on their platform are repeals of Amendments to the Constitution, arguing circuitously to the idea that Amendments themselves were somehow unconstitutional. Uh, no, dipshits.
Anyone care to guess what kind of governmental acts (other than Roe v. Wade) these Mensa Reject rejects find most compelling of their fervor? If you guessed civil rights for minorities, you win the big fat homophobe special phallic cigar. “Criminal penalties should apply to those [who] place members of the public at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS,” they inform us, and they also want you to know in no uncertain terms that they are against gay marriage, gay adoption, gay rights, gay cars, gay fashion shows, gay dogs, and gay gays. Methinks you doth protest too much, ladies.
Also on their list is the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, more commonly known as the Civil Rights Act, which disallowed literacy tests, poll taxes, and other means to keep blacks from voting. And the repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, which allows for direct, popular election of Senators as opposed to election by state legislatures. They want the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US. And they’re against statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. Why? They never say, but I suspect it’s because 50 is a cooler number than 51 or 52 (or alternately you could argue that both places are filled with non-honkies). Since they believe statehood is voluntary, they make no provision for D.C. becoming a state if Alabama decides to opt out.
Orwellian language is on high display herein as well. One should always be concerned about a political party who tells us they are “opposed to any New World Order,” claiming to be against to military adventurism abroad while itching for us to take back the Panama Canal. My favorite item was this truly mind-wrenching bit of self-contradiction: “We call on our local, state and federal governments to uphold our cherished First Amendment right to free speech by vigorously enforcing our laws against obscenity.” Got that? We will protect free speech by taking it away, Mr. Potty-Mouth.
White, reactionary, racist, and stupid as all get out, The Constitution Party represents everything the Republican Party would like to have the guts to be. Inch by craven inch, though, they’re working their way there.
The Reform Party
The shell of a party since the absence of founding ding-a-ling, H. Ross Perot, the Reform Party had only two other marquis name on their list — embarrassing former pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura, a red diaper gorilla baby with cop dillhole mustachio, before he too bolted to form his Independence Party, and the terminally, beligerently stupid Pat Buchanan. Having shifted to the right (for Pat) only to fragment into a thousand splinters, this squirt of a party has creaked back toward centrist positions after shedding the shitbags. Inspired by their businessman forefather, the Reform Party’s platform is heavy on the bullet points, everything set up to be copied and pasted into a PowerPoint presentation from hell. This means reading their plans for America is dull, dull, dull. That alone should be grounds to keep them out of power.
Actually, I’m being too cruel to the new husk of a Reform Party, which seems genuinely interested in reform — as their name covertly suggests. They’re supposedly pro-labor, pro-environment, for a balanced budget (too restrictively in my opinion, sometimes you gotta spend to the red, baby), and they have a kinder, gentler version of the Constitution Party’s anti-immigrant stance. Not quite understanding Social Security, they want to phase it out and replace it with a remarkably similar pension program. There’s a kind of endearing, apple-cheeked sincerity in their platform that is just too cute to mock too hard. For example, in writing about taxes, they write:
- We shall create a new tax system.
- The new system shall be fair and simple.
- The new system shall raise the money needed to pay the nation's constitutionally legitimate bills.
- Analyze, model, and publicly debate the best options. All options should be considered, including tariffs, value-added taxes, and taxes on income, sales, assets, gasoline, and financial transactions.
- Allow voters to provide input on the new system.
- Any future tax increases under the new system must be approved by the people in the next federal election, in order to impose discipline on spending
- Any tax law that benefits a discrete minority shall be subject to strict scrutiny and shall become law only if a compelling interest can be demonstrated.
Get that? They will create a new tax system, simple and fair, to pay for our country’s bills, and we’ll debate the best plans even letting the voters in on the discussion. Marvelous idea. Truly revolutionary. It’s like when you were in high school and your parents wanted to sit down and have you draw up a budget based on your Burger King paycheck and your car insurance and your gas and your clothes, and all that. Cute.
For more of their earnestness, they want ethics in government, and you know what that means. Yes, “no more free meals.” The problem with our country has been too many free chicken dinners for politicians, too many extra pancakes sneaked at those Sunday morning campaign church stops. This will end, by gum. I don’t doubt that gluttons bilk at every chance they get to strap on the feedbag, but I wonder if this is important enough to put in your top three ethic clean up ideas.
The Libertarian Party
Jesus what a bunch of wankers. The perpetual bitch of the Republican Party. Even more religious than the Constitution Party, this group slavers at the capitalist boot like nobody’s business and would lick Jack Welch’s tired old sphincter if they had half a chance. Their religion is “the free market,” their gospel texts are Ayn Rand, and their patron saint is Milton Friedman. A fairly humorless bunch, Libertarians react to negative comments about the free market as though you insulted somebody’s mama. Nothing matters to them more then cashola, though they use a logicalish argument to get them to it, putting the individual on a pedestal, then putting the individual’s property on top of him. They claim to believe in the sanctity of property, though none of them seem too keen on handing over their own yard to the Indians and packing it in to go back to Europe.
You could demonstrate in argument, with statistics, reams of graphs, and the incisions of laser-beam logic the pragmatic value of a restriction on corporations, oh let's say, dumping toxic chemicals in public waterways, and they’d still see the regulation as evil evil bad bad nasty. As deluded a bunch of suckers as I’ve ever come across in my lifetime, libertarianism used to be somewhat serious-minded about civil liberties first and foremost, but now they’ve devolved into, in the words of Berkeley Breathed, a bunch of “whining tax dodgers.”
What makes this batch of douchebags particularly pernicious is how easily duped they are by Republicans. Because the Republican Party has been traditionally the no taxes party (at least in theory, though not always, read my lips, in practice), they’ve managed to seduce Libertarians into throwing their lot in with them on occasion, baiting these suckers with the promise of a nice fat tax reduction and the disemboweling of Social Security. Once they’ve snagged the votes, Republicans have of late, gone about handing over the reins of many a decision to the kind of nutjobs who make up the Constitution Party. Suckers. And so, the window dressing of civil liberties that Libertarians take so much pride in showing off as though that were their primary consideration, gets shredded while the Libs get a few measly dollars each paycheck left in by the federal government, to be hoovered out by the state and local municipalities to cover their budget shortfalls. This is cyclical with the Libertarians, each time they get the promise that Trent Lott won’t cum in their mouths, each time they believe, each time they have to wipe off their chins and pick up the few coins Trent tosses on the floor. I’d call them dumb cunts if that weren’t an insult to cunts everywhere.
There are essentially two kinds of Libertarians. First are Libs for Life. These Randroid chumps will remain chumps forever, brashly claiming their independence from the two Big Parties, from compromise, and from relevance. They hypocritically use interstate highways, city sewage, the Big Gubmint created Internet, and any host of other services. Chumps this big go on to support screwballs like Michael Badnarik who is so anti-government he refuses to use the ZIP code.
The other kind is what I like to call Prepublicans, or Libertarian Until Graduation (these L.U.G.s should not be confused with Lesbians Until Graduation, though the concept is the same). Youthful experimenters, they will eventually embrace their inner authoritarian and join the GOP so they can get themselves a tax break. This will involve deals with the devil, handshakes with Reverend Dobson, and such, but boy oh boy what they’ll do with that tax break. An even dumber subset will refer to themselves as anarcho-capitalists in what is either the political equivalent of the genius ideas one can find while huffing paint thinner or the ravings of those who lack fundamental understanding of words and their definitions.
There are other rightwing nutjob parties out there one could mock, such as the Buchanan Brigade-run America First Party with losers like Bo Gritz; the American Independent Party — the Constitution Party with no money and even less appeal; the American Nazi Party — exactly what you think, people too braindead to even fit in with the above mentioned jackasses; the Christian Falangist Party, fascists apparently against the fascists in the Nazi Party; the Constitutional Action Party — dumb enough to make the Constitution Party look like geniuses; the Family Values Party, which while one could mistake it for the other religious fruitcake fascists, has the distinct claim of its founding member having spoken with God himself who “specifically told him to encourage people to stop paying taxes until the public funding of abortion ends;” and the Prohibition Party (what? They’re still out there?). Like I said, I could mock these fiddlestick-brains, but that would stretch this already long column to at least four times its length. There aren’t words enough for all the foolishness in the world, nor time enough had I started on Monday, Day One, when there was light, and it was good.
Tune in later for a look at the American Left where I’ll take a stick and poke at the vaguer distinctions between the Socialist Party USA, Socialist Action, Socialist Equality Party, Socialist Labor Party, the Social Democrats and the Democratic Socialists, and the Socialist Workers Party. Won’t that be fun? Like naming body hair.
David Denby Style
The Milkman, Donald O’Connor, Jimmy Durante, Piper Laurie, Directed by Charles Barton, 1950
This charming little musical teams up twenty-five year old song and dance man Donald O’Connor as the son of a local milk magnate and the self-styled Schnozzola, Jimmy Durante as a kooky milkman with a self-driving car. At its core, this apparently slight film is really about the stifling of the younger generation’s dreams by their elders, while its surface plays gingerly about an updated Romeo and Juliet theme. Durante writes more than one of the catchy numbers that litter the gleaming black and white surface, ably delivered by O’Connor’s fine Irish tenor, though this is often upstaged by the younger actor’s unusually elastic command of physical slapstick comedy. While O’Connor, here playing the earnest Roger Bradley, weakened or wounded from a never specified trauma during World War II, gyrates his way through his internship at his father’s rival’s milk company, Durante looks on through a multitudinous series of double takes, stock pauses, low gags and puns, his great hangdog face as gelatinous as O’Connor’s hips. The older actor has appeared in many of these type of seemingly innocuous semi-musicals, often portraying characters not too far removed from his zany Breezy Albright, a sort of stock buddy character, never overtly romantic in his depictions, though often with what amounts to a sweet-tempered and harmless lechery, most notably when he was paired with Buster Keaton in 1932’s The Passionate Plumber. Mr. O’Connor appeared already in two other films the same year, most notably as completely green soldier Peter Stirling in Francis the Talking Mule, where he made a similar awkward love to Patricia Medina’s Maureen Gelder.
The Milkman doesn’t ravish so much as charm us, wooing with a number of low-key songs, well crafted with catchy melodies, some penned by Durante himself, most notably the opening number “Nobody Wants My Money.” Partly this is because O’Connor himself, no one’s idea of a dreamboat lead, is himself cut from the buddy/partner cloth that Durante epitomizes, though at a much younger (and albeit more handsome) stage. The film lacks any sexual center, any real box office draw in the sense of a Bogart or a Gable, the kind of leading men who sweep their female counterparts away in torrential passionate scenes that call to mind erotic friezes at times with their clutching bodies and their intertwined limbs. Likewise, O’Connor’s footwork, while at one and the same time light, airy, fun, amusing, and elegant, wants for the panache, the elan that Astaire always inspires us with, and falls rather short of Kelly’s muscular steps that fairly pulse with male energy. All the same, he manages to entice us with at times truly beautiful footwork, a limber legged rubberiness that is both smooth and with the appearance of effortlessness. No hoofer, this zany Breezy Albright, Durante’s few dance numbers consist more of coarse sight gags and a bit of soft-shoe.
The complications in a film like this, a film that lives for its complications, are straight from the best of sources, Shakespeare. Two milk magnate’s families, both alike in dignity, seek to dominate the town’s ever growing dairy needs. Roger, frustrated by the unwillingness his father (Henry O’Neill delivering his best high-toned WASP over his slight Irish-American accent) shows toward his wishes to be a useful member of society, leaves his protection. Rebelliously, Roger takes a job with the competition in the form of Paul Harvey’s D.A. Abbott Dairy, inspired to do so by his friend, Albright. Why this young heir to a dairy fortune is friends with a somewhat disreputable crank of a milkman working for the competition the film never makes clear, though one suspects this kind of plot weakness neither bothers the studio heads nor the audience of either actor. This rather easily resolved plot complication is further twisted by the appearance of newcomer Piper Laurie’s Chris Abbott, ingenue daughter to Roger’s new boss. This is accompanied by the usual misunderstandings and entanglements, the lovers’ tiff, the madcap plot to regain her love, winding up to the slambang finish replete with the lucky device of Albright’s self-driven milk truck.
Director Charles Barton’s extensive career in two-reelers and Abbott and Costello full length features makes him a perfect choice for the more comedic scenes of the film, yet when the romantic portions arrive they are shot as if filmed through gauzy curtains. These moments, though often preceded and followed by comedy, and sometimes involving comedy throughout, are in need of a somewhat more ginger touch than Barton’s experience has prepared him for, though it’d be a hard task to find a director who could make much decent romantic use of O’Connor’s at times googly eyes. Laurie’s expressive eyes are likewise neglected or not made of enough use to advance the emotion in their romance. The film also brings together the workmanlike skills of Al Beich, who started out writing the prison pictures You Can’t Beat the Law and Girls in Chains as well as other crime films like Gangs of the Waterfront. He is assisted in this endeavor by James O’Hanlon, a sometime screenwriter, sometime screenplay fixer, adding additional dialogue to similarly crime inspired films like the 1947 sequel Song of the Thin Man.
And although the song and dance numbers throughout have a certain comic lightness, you’d want to see a little more intimacy, a little more spark fly between O’Connor and Laurie. They share exactly no songs, O’Connor’s duets being solely with Durante, including the rousing closing number "That’s My Boy" featuring the footwork of the latter as well as his vocal contributions. In our happier ending version of the Bard from Avon’s tale, one almost expects the two voices joined, the bond of the two milk magnates being ever increased, and this moment calls out for a romantic duet. It is perhaps the greatest disappointment that we are not treated to this cream of cinematic moments.
Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Everett Sloane, Dorothy Comingore, Directed by Orson Welles, 1941
Wunderkind Welles has produced a rather interesting film that is destined to be a masterpiece of the cinema. Replete with an often unsympathetic lead character played by himself, the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, peculiar camera angles unlike anything you’ve seen in any other film, and a cast of seasoned radio regulars, Citizen Kane tells the story of one man’s life all in the search for what his mysterious last word meant. It is sure to be considered great in years to come.
This charming little musical teams up twenty-five year old song and dance man Donald O’Connor as the son of a local milk magnate and the self-styled Schnozzola, Jimmy Durante as a kooky milkman with a self-driving car. At its core, this apparently slight film is really about the stifling of the younger generation’s dreams by their elders, while its surface plays gingerly about an updated Romeo and Juliet theme. Durante writes more than one of the catchy numbers that litter the gleaming black and white surface, ably delivered by O’Connor’s fine Irish tenor, though this is often upstaged by the younger actor’s unusually elastic command of physical slapstick comedy. While O’Connor, here playing the earnest Roger Bradley, weakened or wounded from a never specified trauma during World War II, gyrates his way through his internship at his father’s rival’s milk company, Durante looks on through a multitudinous series of double takes, stock pauses, low gags and puns, his great hangdog face as gelatinous as O’Connor’s hips. The older actor has appeared in many of these type of seemingly innocuous semi-musicals, often portraying characters not too far removed from his zany Breezy Albright, a sort of stock buddy character, never overtly romantic in his depictions, though often with what amounts to a sweet-tempered and harmless lechery, most notably when he was paired with Buster Keaton in 1932’s The Passionate Plumber. Mr. O’Connor appeared already in two other films the same year, most notably as completely green soldier Peter Stirling in Francis the Talking Mule, where he made a similar awkward love to Patricia Medina’s Maureen Gelder.
The Milkman doesn’t ravish so much as charm us, wooing with a number of low-key songs, well crafted with catchy melodies, some penned by Durante himself, most notably the opening number “Nobody Wants My Money.” Partly this is because O’Connor himself, no one’s idea of a dreamboat lead, is himself cut from the buddy/partner cloth that Durante epitomizes, though at a much younger (and albeit more handsome) stage. The film lacks any sexual center, any real box office draw in the sense of a Bogart or a Gable, the kind of leading men who sweep their female counterparts away in torrential passionate scenes that call to mind erotic friezes at times with their clutching bodies and their intertwined limbs. Likewise, O’Connor’s footwork, while at one and the same time light, airy, fun, amusing, and elegant, wants for the panache, the elan that Astaire always inspires us with, and falls rather short of Kelly’s muscular steps that fairly pulse with male energy. All the same, he manages to entice us with at times truly beautiful footwork, a limber legged rubberiness that is both smooth and with the appearance of effortlessness. No hoofer, this zany Breezy Albright, Durante’s few dance numbers consist more of coarse sight gags and a bit of soft-shoe.
The complications in a film like this, a film that lives for its complications, are straight from the best of sources, Shakespeare. Two milk magnate’s families, both alike in dignity, seek to dominate the town’s ever growing dairy needs. Roger, frustrated by the unwillingness his father (Henry O’Neill delivering his best high-toned WASP over his slight Irish-American accent) shows toward his wishes to be a useful member of society, leaves his protection. Rebelliously, Roger takes a job with the competition in the form of Paul Harvey’s D.A. Abbott Dairy, inspired to do so by his friend, Albright. Why this young heir to a dairy fortune is friends with a somewhat disreputable crank of a milkman working for the competition the film never makes clear, though one suspects this kind of plot weakness neither bothers the studio heads nor the audience of either actor. This rather easily resolved plot complication is further twisted by the appearance of newcomer Piper Laurie’s Chris Abbott, ingenue daughter to Roger’s new boss. This is accompanied by the usual misunderstandings and entanglements, the lovers’ tiff, the madcap plot to regain her love, winding up to the slambang finish replete with the lucky device of Albright’s self-driven milk truck.
Director Charles Barton’s extensive career in two-reelers and Abbott and Costello full length features makes him a perfect choice for the more comedic scenes of the film, yet when the romantic portions arrive they are shot as if filmed through gauzy curtains. These moments, though often preceded and followed by comedy, and sometimes involving comedy throughout, are in need of a somewhat more ginger touch than Barton’s experience has prepared him for, though it’d be a hard task to find a director who could make much decent romantic use of O’Connor’s at times googly eyes. Laurie’s expressive eyes are likewise neglected or not made of enough use to advance the emotion in their romance. The film also brings together the workmanlike skills of Al Beich, who started out writing the prison pictures You Can’t Beat the Law and Girls in Chains as well as other crime films like Gangs of the Waterfront. He is assisted in this endeavor by James O’Hanlon, a sometime screenwriter, sometime screenplay fixer, adding additional dialogue to similarly crime inspired films like the 1947 sequel Song of the Thin Man.
And although the song and dance numbers throughout have a certain comic lightness, you’d want to see a little more intimacy, a little more spark fly between O’Connor and Laurie. They share exactly no songs, O’Connor’s duets being solely with Durante, including the rousing closing number "That’s My Boy" featuring the footwork of the latter as well as his vocal contributions. In our happier ending version of the Bard from Avon’s tale, one almost expects the two voices joined, the bond of the two milk magnates being ever increased, and this moment calls out for a romantic duet. It is perhaps the greatest disappointment that we are not treated to this cream of cinematic moments.
Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Everett Sloane, Dorothy Comingore, Directed by Orson Welles, 1941
Wunderkind Welles has produced a rather interesting film that is destined to be a masterpiece of the cinema. Replete with an often unsympathetic lead character played by himself, the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, peculiar camera angles unlike anything you’ve seen in any other film, and a cast of seasoned radio regulars, Citizen Kane tells the story of one man’s life all in the search for what his mysterious last word meant. It is sure to be considered great in years to come.
Video Games That Should Never Have Been Made
It’s become natural for the release of any big budget movie to be prefaced with the video game tie-in release. Constantine, The X-Men, The Matrix you name it, there’s a game version. The game makers (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) all have reaped such amazing profit margins with this that the normal rules no longer apply. This trend has reached an appalling level with the featured games below. In most cases, the games were dull or tasteless with a few exceptions being dull and tasteless. As a rule of thumb, dull rarely equals tasteless and vice-versa, but in the gamer world, such restrictions are outmoded.
So here are some snapshots of games that I just can’t comprehend how they were greenlighted by the manufacturers. Unlike previous game reviews ranked by stars, there is no rating system for these turkeys — they all receive zero.
Mystic River, the online reworking, wins hands down in the film tie-in category for most tasteless adaptation. Players have the choice of being Jimmy, Sean, or Dave in this — I hesitate to call it a game. Graphically, none of the characters look like their respective actors (Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, or Tim Robbins) most likely due to licensing considerations. Gamers select personas in this multiparty play, moving against each other after the brutal murder of a young girl. As Sean, your goal is to find out who murdered Jimmy’s daughter; as Jimmy your job is to find and kill someone, as fate would design it Dave; as Dave, your job is to trick Jimmy into killing you. Drawbacks tied into the characters include Sean’s slow ploddingness and Jimmy’s sudden bursts of rage that disengages him from the gamer’s control. Apparently secret codes are available readily online that allow you to take partial control over Sean during these raging episodes harnessing the power of Sean Penn’s overacting. Pedophilia was never so fun.
Nintendo Game Cube’s Girl with A Pearl Earring wins for dullest videogame ever created. In it, you paint. Sometimes a crazed wife comes in to shout at you or to shout at the model. By some kind of karate maneuver, you can drive her out of the room, but she will come back with her snotty son and the local Burgomaster. He you must propitiate and once you can get him to leave it’s back to the kung fu action. While Johannes Vermeer’s martial arts skills were historically of the Aikido school, most gamers won’t mind the obvious partiality for Chinese kuntao that the creators envisioned. What makes this game so dull? The karate sequences (I timed them) only occur after fourteen hours of game-painting, the equivalent of two weeks worth of hour long play. However, through a combination of buttons, you can alternate between badger-hair brushes and sable. Thank god for the pause button.
Movies aren’t the only tie-in games recently released. Pre-packaged in one out of every one hundred new Playstation Portables are two—again I hesitate to use the word—games based on books. While both movie-games above were movies based on books, these games are straight from book to video.
The first is based on Julian Jaynes semi-scientific tome The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Gamers must navigate a rather controversial and unprovable hypothesis regarding prehistoric man’s perception of auditory hallucinations being the result of insufficient communication between the two hemispheres of the brain through the murky waters of history, linguistics, mythology, and peer review at Princeton university. A complex button sequence allows you to string along an argument involving schizophrenia, ancient Babylon, and the “analog ‘I’” thereby rendering your harshest critics bedazzled. The results on such a small screen as the Playstation Portable are mixed and I eagerly anticipate the version for the home Playstation simply to make out the fine print on Jaynes’ thesis.
A bit more fun is Sony’s Ethics Shop based on philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s opus magnum The Ethics. The graphics are retro-cool and seem to be reminiscent of 80s arcade classic BurgerTime with a short stocky Baruch (nicknamed Bucky for the game) moving rapidly among the various levels of the Too Kool for Skool Philosophy Akademy as he tries to avoid the Sephardic Rabbis and construct a geometric treatise the nature of G-d. Far more probable than the adaptation of Jaynes, this Spinoza game features such exciting philosophy sandwich ingredients as the Buns of Knowledge, the Causa Sui Sauce, Essence Topping, and the Meat of Infinite Substance. If you manage to construct these Thelogico-Political Sandwiches with success, you move on through succeeding levels of difficulty until you manage a panpsychist solution to neutral monism. Recommended only for the deepest gamers, ultimately then meaning no one. You can easily understand why Sony is giving this one away.
Finally, in the category of the truly tasteless, we have Feeding Tube (A GOP Production) sold only for Microsoft Xbox. In this video travesty, gamers try to score the maximum amount of sympathy and anger points from a alternately cheering and jeering “Republican Base” as you simultaneously attempt insertions of feeding tubes into white patients while removing them from black patients. That any single person would allow their name to be associated with this game, let alone House Speaker Tom DeLay’s blurb on the box (“Fantastic fun for all of us down in Texas”) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist doing consultation fees for “medical accuracy,” is a bit stunning even to my jaded beliefs. Rush Limbaugh has touted the game as “a joke” adding that editorial and consumer outrage is “just uptight more liberal namby-pamby-ism from the mainstream media.” Caveat emptor, and all that.
The real question posed to us by games of this kind, and there are many, many more, is just how great the profit margins are on the bigger selling games to allow such niche-marketed or vanity-project games such as these to even exist. We regularly receive all kinds of lesser selling, lesser known games (Jenna Jameson’s Deep Ass, “Stage-A-Play,” Remanded to Felony Court, and a host of other limited-appeal videos) and someone has to be paying the salaries of the graphic artists and the soundtrack creators and the programmers and on down the line. The mind boggles, it truly does.
So here are some snapshots of games that I just can’t comprehend how they were greenlighted by the manufacturers. Unlike previous game reviews ranked by stars, there is no rating system for these turkeys — they all receive zero.
Mystic River, the online reworking, wins hands down in the film tie-in category for most tasteless adaptation. Players have the choice of being Jimmy, Sean, or Dave in this — I hesitate to call it a game. Graphically, none of the characters look like their respective actors (Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, or Tim Robbins) most likely due to licensing considerations. Gamers select personas in this multiparty play, moving against each other after the brutal murder of a young girl. As Sean, your goal is to find out who murdered Jimmy’s daughter; as Jimmy your job is to find and kill someone, as fate would design it Dave; as Dave, your job is to trick Jimmy into killing you. Drawbacks tied into the characters include Sean’s slow ploddingness and Jimmy’s sudden bursts of rage that disengages him from the gamer’s control. Apparently secret codes are available readily online that allow you to take partial control over Sean during these raging episodes harnessing the power of Sean Penn’s overacting. Pedophilia was never so fun.
Nintendo Game Cube’s Girl with A Pearl Earring wins for dullest videogame ever created. In it, you paint. Sometimes a crazed wife comes in to shout at you or to shout at the model. By some kind of karate maneuver, you can drive her out of the room, but she will come back with her snotty son and the local Burgomaster. He you must propitiate and once you can get him to leave it’s back to the kung fu action. While Johannes Vermeer’s martial arts skills were historically of the Aikido school, most gamers won’t mind the obvious partiality for Chinese kuntao that the creators envisioned. What makes this game so dull? The karate sequences (I timed them) only occur after fourteen hours of game-painting, the equivalent of two weeks worth of hour long play. However, through a combination of buttons, you can alternate between badger-hair brushes and sable. Thank god for the pause button.
Movies aren’t the only tie-in games recently released. Pre-packaged in one out of every one hundred new Playstation Portables are two—again I hesitate to use the word—games based on books. While both movie-games above were movies based on books, these games are straight from book to video.
The first is based on Julian Jaynes semi-scientific tome The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Gamers must navigate a rather controversial and unprovable hypothesis regarding prehistoric man’s perception of auditory hallucinations being the result of insufficient communication between the two hemispheres of the brain through the murky waters of history, linguistics, mythology, and peer review at Princeton university. A complex button sequence allows you to string along an argument involving schizophrenia, ancient Babylon, and the “analog ‘I’” thereby rendering your harshest critics bedazzled. The results on such a small screen as the Playstation Portable are mixed and I eagerly anticipate the version for the home Playstation simply to make out the fine print on Jaynes’ thesis.
A bit more fun is Sony’s Ethics Shop based on philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s opus magnum The Ethics. The graphics are retro-cool and seem to be reminiscent of 80s arcade classic BurgerTime with a short stocky Baruch (nicknamed Bucky for the game) moving rapidly among the various levels of the Too Kool for Skool Philosophy Akademy as he tries to avoid the Sephardic Rabbis and construct a geometric treatise the nature of G-d. Far more probable than the adaptation of Jaynes, this Spinoza game features such exciting philosophy sandwich ingredients as the Buns of Knowledge, the Causa Sui Sauce, Essence Topping, and the Meat of Infinite Substance. If you manage to construct these Thelogico-Political Sandwiches with success, you move on through succeeding levels of difficulty until you manage a panpsychist solution to neutral monism. Recommended only for the deepest gamers, ultimately then meaning no one. You can easily understand why Sony is giving this one away.
Finally, in the category of the truly tasteless, we have Feeding Tube (A GOP Production) sold only for Microsoft Xbox. In this video travesty, gamers try to score the maximum amount of sympathy and anger points from a alternately cheering and jeering “Republican Base” as you simultaneously attempt insertions of feeding tubes into white patients while removing them from black patients. That any single person would allow their name to be associated with this game, let alone House Speaker Tom DeLay’s blurb on the box (“Fantastic fun for all of us down in Texas”) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist doing consultation fees for “medical accuracy,” is a bit stunning even to my jaded beliefs. Rush Limbaugh has touted the game as “a joke” adding that editorial and consumer outrage is “just uptight more liberal namby-pamby-ism from the mainstream media.” Caveat emptor, and all that.
The real question posed to us by games of this kind, and there are many, many more, is just how great the profit margins are on the bigger selling games to allow such niche-marketed or vanity-project games such as these to even exist. We regularly receive all kinds of lesser selling, lesser known games (Jenna Jameson’s Deep Ass, “Stage-A-Play,” Remanded to Felony Court, and a host of other limited-appeal videos) and someone has to be paying the salaries of the graphic artists and the soundtrack creators and the programmers and on down the line. The mind boggles, it truly does.
