Category Archives: Popular culture

South Carolinians for Fred Thompson

A group of South Carolinians officeholders — with Rep. Gresham Barrett being the most notable among them — gathered today to call on Fred Thompson to get in the race:

AP P M1030 SC FRED THOMPSON S.C.Download
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AP-SC FRED THOMPSON S.C.
Handful of SC lawmakers urge Fred Thompson to run for White House
By JIM DAVENPORT
Associated Press Writer

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – A handful of South Carolina legislators on Wednesday urged Fred Thompson toward a formal presidential candidacy and said groundwork for a campaign was being laid in this early voting state.

State Sen. Larry Grooms said conservative voters in South Carolina are looking for something more than what the current field of Republican candidates has to offer.

"They’re all good guys, but there’s something lacking in every one of them," said Grooms, who was flanked by six other legislators and U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., at a Statehouse news conference. "I think Fred Thompson is the type of candidate that many people in this state are looking for."

People close to the former Tennessee senator and "Law & Order" actor say he will form a "testing the waters" committee that will allow him to raise money and that he plans a campaign swing through various early primary states in late June before an official campaign launch around July 4.

Barrett said the supporters were simply trying to build excitement for Thompson in South Carolina.

"We know he’s behind the 8-ball and he’s got a lot of ground to make up," Barrett said. This will "help him establish kind of a skeleton crew so when he does announce that we’ve got some people in place that he can build on."

Barrett said he did not know of any planned visits by Thompson to South Carolina.

Other presidential candidates have been raising money and soliciting support in South Carolina for months. Arizona Sen. John McCain enlisted a majority of Republican legislators here earlier this year for his exploratory campaign.

But some, like state Rep. Mike Pitts of Laurens, have said they are considering taking their endorsement elsewhere. Pitts was particularly upset because of McCain’s support for the illegal immigration bill now being debated in the Senate.

Joining Grooms at the news conference Wednesday were state Sens. John Hawkins and Ray Cleary and Reps. Michael Thompson, Brian White, Eric Bedingfield and Jeff Duncan.

I don’t know. I like Fred, and he made a good impression that one time he came to see me, back in 2000. But he was such a jerk to Clint Eastwood back when he was White House chief of staff, so I have my reservations.

It’s a song about Alice — you remember Alice…

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This is a follow-up post.

First — Ed, take it easy. I was trying to be considerate of you in not naming you. It’s been pointed out that it can seem unfair for me to take a comment and answer it in a post — some say I’m using my position to tear down another person — so I didn’t name you. Of course, what would "Ed" have told anybody? Not much. So no harm either way, I guess.

Secondly, as Bill said (trust our Bill to recognize a song allusion), that’s from "Alice’s Restaurant." I try not to be too mysterious, which is why, if you click on the link in the first place where I refer to the song, you get the full lyrics.

The song was actually the inspiration for the post. In the song — supposedly inspired by real-life events — Arlo Guthrie gets rejected from the draft because of his criminal record. His crime? Littering. There’s a very funny passage (the "song" is mostly spoken, and it’s about 20 minutes or more long) in which, after acknowledging he has a record, he is sent to the Group W bench, where he sits with real criminals, who at first turn their backs on him when they learn he’s just a litterbug, but come back when he adds, "and creatin’ a nuisance."

Anyway, so you don’t have to scroll or search through all that, here’s the relevant passage:

… and he stopped me right there and said, "Kid, I want you to go and sit down on that bench that says Group W …. NOW kid!!"

And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W’s where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean ‘n’ ugly
‘n’ nasty ‘n’ horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad’ya get?" I said, "I didn’t get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?"
And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sergeant came over, had some paper in his hand, held it up and said…

Of course, it’s much better when you hear Arlo telling it.

Speaking of Arlo — did anybody notice that his daughter, who’s been living right here amongst us for years, had her last performance in Columbia a couple of weekends ago? She and her husband and kids are going to move up to the country somewhere near her Dad (which, as it happens, is not all that far from Stockbridge, Mass., where the littering crime occurred). They have plans to grow blueberries, and she wants to learn to make a pie with them. They plan to do other stuff, too — touring and such — but I really liked the part about the blueberries.

I never saw her all the time she lived here. I did see her once, though, on stage with her Dad. You’ll never guess where, so I won’t ask you to. They were performing at Disney World — Epcot, in fact. They were in this amphitheater on the lake or lagoon or whatever, and they were part of a "flower power" series.

We just sort of happened upon it, on a warm late spring or early summer afternoon. It was quite odd. Arlo knew that, and one of the first things he said to the audience was, "Yeah, I think it’s kinda weird, too."

It was a fairly intimate setting, and folks called out songs they wanted to hear. At one point, I couldn’t hear the request, but he replied, "Now you know I can’t do that here." I suppose he was referring to "Alice’s Restaurant," although it could have been "Mr. Customs Man." Anyway, he didn’t do either.

I apologize for doing another whole post on this. It started as just an answer to Ed among the comments, but then it stretched out, and I kept on adding "circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was" (that’s another song allusion), and figured I wouldn’t waste all that effort on something nobody saw, so here it is.

Immigration most foul

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OK, now I see why everybody gets so upset about illegal immigrants from Mexico. It’s because what they have done is so thoroughly heinous. A correspondent on a previous post responded, after I had noted the absurdity of the idea that a non-police state would or could round up 12 million people and deport them, thusly:

We can’t catch all bank robbers, so let’s bring them out of the shadows
and get paper work on them too, Brad. And child molesters. And
murderers. Sure, we’ll get some paperwork on ’em, make ’em pay a fine,
and everything is OK, right? Is that your logic? We don’t do what’s in
this "compromise" for any other class of criminal, and it’s really so
ridiculous that no one even proposes it for murderers and child
molesters. Why are we even contemplating it for illegal aliens?

Let’s see — bank robbers, child molesters, murderers, mother rapers, father stabbers, and what else do we have here on the Group W bench? Oh, yes — a few people who walked across an invisible line in the desert to do menial labor for a pittance.

At that point, everybody moves away from the illegal aliens there on the Group W bench, but then they say, "And creating a nuisance," and everybody moves back and shakes their hands and they all have a fine time together talking about father-rapin’ and bank-robbin’ and pickin’ vegetables in the hot sun, and all sorts of groovy things …

What an odd crime to hyperventilate about. Kind of like jaywalking, only without the immediate threat of causing a traffic accident.

Her majesty had it right

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Having been too busy lately to so much as watch a DVD from Netflix (I’ve really been wasting that money), I overindulged over the weekend. My younger son and I went to see "Next," then I went straight home to watch the rental that had come of "The Queen." Brief thoughts:

Next was better than expected, but it had this problem — if a guy can see his own future for two minutes out, how can he change it? If he changes it, that means it doesn’t happen, which means it isn’t actually his future, so how can he see it? What he should be seeing is himself changing it, and what happens instead as a result. But how could he act to change it if he didn’t see it, because it was never going to happen? I could see him winning at cards, because all he has to do is bet differently, knowing what cards are coming, but not changing the cards that are coming. In that case, he would probably see himself winning, because that’s his actual future. But dodging bullets? Preventing his girlfriend from getting blown up? I don’t think so. My son told me that this wasn’t a problem, that if I read more comic books I’d get it, but I don’t know. The whole time paradox was treated better in "The Final Countdown" (although what that title had to do with the actual film, I don’t know). It was very satisfactory right up until the time that — WARNING: PLOT SPOILER — the Nimitz was about to fight off the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, then they got snatched back to 1980. I guess they didn’t have a big enough budget for more than two Mitsubishis, or the writers just got too confused to go on.
The Queen was more or less as good as I had expected, which was quite. I don’t know about you, but I cheered for Her Majesty’s position all the way through. I will never, ever understand the tears and flapdoodle that seemed universal over the death of her ex-daughter-in-law. I understand it no better than I do the appeal of reality TV, or the idiots who bit their fingernails hoping Michael Jackson would be acquited. Of course, it’s all the same thing. Diana was a lovely young woman — graceful, sweet-looking. But give me the I-grew-up-during-the-war, stiff-upper-lip approach every time. Grief should be private, and what business do total strangers have grieving anyway? Lowering a flag at Buckingham, when the queen wasn’t even there, meaning there should be no standard anyway? It was idiocy, and she shouldn’t have been compelled to give in to it. I was much bothered by the way his role made Tony Blair look like a shallow twit through much of the film — the pandering apologist to celebrity-soaked, trashy sentimentalism — but when he got a little backbone and defended his sovereign from first his wife, then his churlish press aide, he seemed more like the Tony I admire so. Elizabeth was bound to lose her battle for a little dignity, of course, especially with her whiny scrub of a son undermining her, but I admire her for holding out as long as she did.

Oh, Elvis, come home! We’ll forgive you

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      I was committed to life and then commuted to the outskirts
With all the love in the world
      Living for thirty minutes at a time with a break in the middle for adverts
   — "The Invisible Man," by Elvis Costello

I don’t watch much TV, aside from DVDs, and when I do, it tends to be a bit of a culture shock.

I watched "House" last night, knowing it will be a while before I can buy the third season, and I saw something truly appalling — Elvis Costello, doing what appeared to be a car commercial.

Sure, he did it in a cool and hip sort of way, but still, it was just so, well… commercial. And this from our angry young man.

First Michael Jackson owning the Beatles’ catalog, now this. The disillusionments we must suffer as we grow old.

Who resurrected the electric car?

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As part of my continuing quest to stay within shouting distance of at least a passing acquaintance with recent film, I watched the following three (on DVD of course):

"All the King’s Men."
Fairly entertaining, but bizarre. I don’t
think there was a single Southerner in it, much less a Louisianan, and
the accents were all over the place. Why couldn’t they have gotten
James Carville to play Sugarboy? Of course, Stark’s boys wouldn’t have been Cajun. He could have been Tiny Duffy, then, instead of Tony Soprano filling that part. It didn’t really disappoint, but my expectations weren’t high.
My expectations were very high for "The Departed," and I’m happy to report that they were exceeded. This may be Scorcese’s best, and that’s say a LOT. Yeah, it’s another gangster film, but it’s as different from "Goodfellas" as "Goodfellas" was from "Mean Streets." And it completely deserves to be mentioned alongside them. I’ll say no more about it; I don’t want to spoil anything. See it.
"Who Killed the Electric Car." Maybe not as great esthetically as "The Departed," but still a must-see. The conspiracy of interested parties that together ended California’s experiment in creating a market for electric cars is enough to turn the most sensible person into Oliver Stone. To see the wonderful vehicles GM and other major automakers created to meet that demand, then to see them crush the movement, then round up every one of the vehicles for destruction — even though the leaseholders (they never let anybody buy one) desperately wanted to keep them — is pretty powerful stuff.

But imagine my surprise, after seeing that, to go down to party on St. Patrick’s Day in Five Points and find — an electric car.

Not a mere hybrid, mind you, but a car that you can plug in anywhere, a car that uses NO fossil fuels whatsoever. (At least, not unless your electricity is provided by coal, which is too often the case.) Hybrids have their advantages, of course, with their unlimited range. But there’s such an inspiring purity about the electric car. If we could all drive those, with electricity provided by nukes, the Energy Party dream would be here.

In case you’re interested: The vehicle is called a Zap car (ZAP stands for Zero Air Pollution), and are being promoted locally by Dr. F. Steven Isom. His Website is EVCarolina.com, and the phone number on his business card — which proclaims "Electric Vehicles NOW!" — is (803) 233-1700.

Cool stuff.

Beer and WHAT?!?

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Cleaning up my desk, I run into the March 7 edition of the print version of politico.com, and there’s a story about the beverage preferences between Democrats and Republicans, as observed by Washington bartenders.

The findings are fairly pedestrian, mostly:

"A Democrat’s drink? I think of a gin and tonic or a martini," said Matt Saperstone, a server at Smith & Wollensky on 19th Street, adding that an older, more conservative male crowd orders scotch on the rocks.
"I think Republicans have a tendency to drink more high-end stuff. … I think of Democrats as more beer drinking," said Matt Weiss, owner of Lounge 201 on Capitol Hill.
Wine, meanwhile, has bipartisan appeal, Saperstone said. "Republicans drink just as much wine as Democrats."
The effects, however, are totally bipartisan: "At the end of the night, they’re both inebriated," said Weiss.

I have no doubt. I certainly hope they’re numb before they try the favorite concoction of Sen. Jon Tester of Montana. He orders a Bud Lite, and then asks: Jon_tester1

"Can you throw some tomato juice in there for me?" he asks the waitress, who, as it happens, works days for Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho).
The uninitiated at the table learn that the beer/veggie concoction is called "Red Beer" in Tester territory.
Remember the first time you had a beer, he asks, and how horrible it tasted?
"If you put tomato juice in it, you woulda liked it right out of the chute," he says, and you just kind of get what "right out of the chute" means.

(Actually, in the print version, "chute" was misspelled "shoot," which shows what you get when you have a publication started by reporters rather than editors. Looks like they’ve got an editor on the Web version.)

Thank the Lord I wasn’t born as a Montana Democrat.

What about around here? I don’t get out to the watering holes much. I’m still at work during "Happy Hour." But what have y’all observed as the favorite drinks of the respective factions?

Footnote: Does the Web site for Lounge 201 remind you a lot of the poster art for "Swingers?" It does me. I’ll bet folks who hoist a glass there think they are SO money…

Pelosi column

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The deep, dark secret of politics:
They’re all just people

BUSH: Is this movie gonna be called “George and Alexandra”; is that the name of this movie?
PELOSI: I don’t know. What do you think it should be called?
BUSH: Uhh… I don’t know — “Geourneys with George?” Pretty good one, huh? You can spell it with a G?
PELOSI: G, yeah! (laughs)

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
CONSIDER this to be a last kind word before the madness begins. OK, so it’s already started. But it’s never too late for a kind word.
Joe Biden’s been hanging out here a year or two. I’m not sure John McCain ever left in 2000. We’ve seen Christopher Dodd, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, Tom Vilsack. I haven’t actually seen Bill Richardson, but he spoke to one of my colleagues on the phone, so I know he’s thinking about us. Mitt Romney was here last Wednesday. Then Barack Obama on Friday and Saturday, and the other media darling, Hillary Clinton, Monday.
Rudy Giuliani today, ex-Gov. Romney back on Thursday, and some guy named Duncan Hunter Friday.
With 18 contenders between the two major parties, I know I’m forgetting somebody. Oh, yeah — John Edwards was down in Charleston the other day, and his experience was a good example of the madness I’m talking about.
He came to talk about health care. The State’s reporter actually wrote about that. But the traveling press corps only wanted to know about a couple of kids he had hired to blog for him. Really. Not that it was in any way important, but that was The Story of the Day, as decreed by 24-hour cable TV “news” and the always-on-message partisan blogs.
Brace yourself for a lot of this. Gather your strength. Sit back, relax. Rent a movie, and watch it. Specifically, this one: “Journeys with George,” a documentary about George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign for president, made by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.
No, really, it’s good. I was worried, too. I had ordered it from Netflix in late November, thinking it was something I ought to see. Then I let it sit on top of the TV until last week.
Bush according to Pelosi, I thought each night. Too much like work. Tired. Watch “House” episode for third time instead.
I broke down last week, at the behest of one of my daughters. Two minutes into it, I called another daughter who was upstairs, told her she had to see this, and started it over. It was that good.
What was so good about it? Well, certainly not the production values. It was shot with a camcorder by Alexandra Pelosi as a home movie of her year as an NBC producer, traveling with the Texas governor as he sought the presidency. You’ve seen YouTube? Like that, only longer.
What was good about it was that everybody in the film came across as a human being. If you don’t find that surprising, you need a quick unreality check: Put this down, watch a couple of hours of TV “news,” then visit a few of the more popular blogs.
See what I mean?
In this movie, the president-to-be is neither the warmongering demon nor the stalwart defender of all that’s right and true.
He’s just this guy. The joshing, never-serious, somewhat condescending uncle to the young woman who keeps sticking a camcorder in his face for reasons that aren’t entirely apparent. A little on the goofy side, but no idiot.
And Ms. Pelosi is neither the Spawn of the Liberal She-Devil nor what you think of when you say “NBC Nightly News” either. She’s not the former because, brace yourself, Nancy Pelosi is actually a human being, too. She’s not the latter partly because she’s a producer, not the on-air “talent” you’re used to. Producers are the ones behind the scenes who get actual work done — arranging travel, lining up interviews, soothing hurt feelings — while the ones you know are checking their hair. Think Andie MacDowell to Bill Murray’s weatherman in “Groundhog Day.”
She comes across as what she apparently is — a bright, friendly young woman who is very tired of getting up at 6 a.m., herded to airplanes and fed turkey sandwiches all day.
The two of them are practically friends. When she gets interested in a smiley guy from Newsweek (who later turns out to be a cad), Gov. Bush teases her, then offers semiserious advice. When she reports a little too accurately on her fellow media types and they all refuse to speak to her, George steps in to make peace.
In other words, they act like people. Likable people, no matter what you think of their politics. So do the others on the bus, including some familiar faces. Nobody took the camcorder girl seriously, so they forgot to put their masks on. Sure, the candidate is deliberately trying to charm the press. What will surprise his detractors is that he’s so good at it. Karl Rove still comes across as a creep, but that’s because it’s real life.
This brilliant little ditty of a film reveals a deep, dark secret: Like Soylent Green, politics is actually made of people. Real people, whom you are not required by law either to hate or to love. You just hang with them, and see them as they are in the tedium of daily coexistence. People, living their lives. Not symbols, not abstractions, not caricatures.
I ordered the movie because Columbia attorney Jim Leventis, a perfectly normal guy who belongs to my Rotary Club, is Alexandra Pelosi’s godfather. He describes the speaker of the House as “just a wonderful mom and just a wonderful friend.” Really.
You should see it if you can, and remember the lesson it teaches. It might ground you enough to preserve your faith in people over the next 12 months.
I’ll try to remember it, too, as those 18 candidates posture for the extremists in their respective parties. If I forget, remind me.

Worst recent war movies

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Tell you what: To relieve the tension a bit (there’s a lot of angry back-and-forth in the last few days, and poor Mary keeps reposting her deleted posts, and is increasingly COMMUNICATING IN SHOUT MODE), let’s take a frivolous digression.

bud attaches great importance to Joe Lieberman having been seen cheering and pumping his fist when the Americans strike a blow against the Serbs in "Behind Enemy Lines." He sees this as reflective of a deep character defect.

Rather than our getting into a really angry back-and-forth about whether one should cheer for Americans or not (I come down on the "yes" side of that), I’m looking for common ground. bud says I don’t see flaws in my heroes. I say that cheering at any part of a movie as bad as "Behind Enemy Lines" is at least indicative of lousy cinematic taste.

Unlike the characters in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity; I don’t consider tastes unlike my own to reflect a deep character defect.
But I do unconsciously give extra points to people who appreciate the "good" stuff — "good" as define by my own proclivities.

So let’s make like Rob, Dick and Barry and construct a Top Five Worst War Movies (post-Vietnam era only, just to limit the field):

"Behind Enemy Lines" — This was done so very much better in "BAT*21," so you know we can’t blame Gene Hackman, since he was in both of them. I was about to blame John Woo, but he didn’t direct this one. It just looks cheesy enough to be one of his.
"The Thin Red Line" — Such a horrible disappointment, by comparison with James Jones’ novel, that I wrote a whole column
about it.
"The Great Raid" — Another disappointment from a perfectly good book. Hollywood tried to turn a remarkable, true story about rescuing hundreds of Allied POWs from the murderous abuses of the Japanese into a sappy romance. Why, I don’t know, but it failed on all levels.
"Pearl Harbor" — More sappy romance, but that wasn’t the worst thing (you want romance done right, see "From Here to Eternity"). The worst thing was the use of special effects for special effects’ sake. In fact, it seemed the entire excuse for the film. Worst moment: When two fighter aircraft, locked in a dog fight, fly between two one-story buildings, turning onto their wingtips to negotiate the narrow alleyway.
"Enemy at the Gates" — This one almost didn’t make the list, but it did for a reason it has in common with Nos. 2, 3 and 4: Sheer disappointment. Finally, I thought, Hollywood was going to pay proper, respectful acknowledgement to the horrors of the Great Patriotic War. Up until then, you’d have thought the Americans and British won the war by themselves; talk about ethnocentric. But the titanic, genocidal struggle between Teutons and Slavs that was the Siege of Stalingrad was reduced to the level of a personal feud between Ed Harris and Jude Law (Jude Law! As the emblematic New Soviet Man!) Really, really disappointing.

Gerald, Saddam and James Brown

At a reader’s request…

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Dave, I’m glad to oblige. I’ll bet you’re not the only reader who’d rather look at South Carolina’s own Andie MacDowell (we do grow ’em pretty down here, don’t we?). Those of you who don’t like this can go back to Borat.

Borat make controversy

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It’s not every day you get to put the star of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" on the editorial page, but I managed it in this morning’s paper.

The thin excuse I used was the letter to the editor that touched — and indirectly, at that — on the subject on today’s page. I inserted a mug shot derived as a detail from the above photo. I hereby reproduce the full-length image for the benefit of you ladies out there — or at least, the really hard-up ladies.

I saw the movie over the weekend. It may be the funniest of the year, although it’s not for the easily offended. It’s not even for the moderately sensitive, for that matter. Come to think of it, it’s not all that tough to be the funniest movie around when one scene features the protagonist wrestling naked with a really hairy fat guy.

Anyway, have any of y’all seen it? What did you think?

Cleaning my desk I: Clemson list

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Trying to clear the decks a bit as we draw close to the end of our endorsement interview marathon (both Mark Sanford and Tommy Moore today), I ran across the several blog-worthy items that had been lying around on my desk. Here’s the first:

Recently, Clemson President James F. Barker spoke to my Rotary, and he told us about "five things you don’t know about Clemson." Well, by the time I got a chance to take notes — about 45 minutes later — I could only remember three. I suppose they were the most interesting three. They were interesting to me, anyway:

It has the largest collection of plant genes in the world. I mean, I knew they were into agriculture, but that’s quite a statistic.
Athletes graduate in a higher percentage than at any other ACC school — a category that includes Duke and UVa.
It runs the largest free public transit system in the world, serving 13,000 in the town of Clemson.

Around here in Gamecock country, those are not the kinds of items you normally hear in a list about Clemson.

Art restoration

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This is one for you art lovers out there. My roommate from my USC days recently took part in the special pre-demolition reception for former inmates of the Honeycombs. He will remain nameless for now — all I will say is that he was an art major, and that is him at the bottom of the above image.

As you see him, he has just restored a graffiti work from his early Gonzo-minimalist period — or restored it as well as he could, working in a hurried fashion before the university authorities could notice he had slipped away from the group.

By the way, my roommate was the responsible one in our duo — he kept his side of the room spotless, with all his art supplies neatly stacked and categorized, his clothes put away in the closet. He was the one with the short, conservative hair. I think he even used to make his bed.

My side looked like a waste dump, featuring pots with week-old food cooked on with my contraband hotplate, sloppily-hung posters and dirty clothes. The finishing touch was my mountain of State newspapers, not one of which I ever tossed, constantly spilling over to his side, and earning me the sobriquet "Ratso Rizzo" (we had both seen "Midnight Cowboy" over at the Russell House). He still calls me that, even though I’ve cut my hair and shaved.

Connoisseurs of early-1970s, 4th-floor Snowden culture will recognize the above hastily-penned reproduction as only dimly evocative of the original, once-thought-to-be-immortal work that was scratched deeply into the paint that coated the concrete-block wall. It was located over the elevator immediately across from our room, and was still there when I took my bride by there on our honeymoon three years later. I was proud to play the docent and explain to her the history behind this treasure. She was suitably impressed, I think — she was speechless.

Unfortunately, the original was lost to a later renovation of the building — probably about the time they put those sissy dividers in to make separate shower stalls in the floor’s one bathroom.

But all is not lost! My roommate and I are planning a guerrilla revisit to the site in the next few days, and hope to restore the original to its rightful place, so that the building’s boisterous spirits will lie at rest when the Big Crash comes. If you would like to help in bringing about this once-in-a-lifetime testament to the (adolescent) human spirit, your cash gifts can be sent to this blog.

We need a new axis of evil

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The President didn’t send me a copy of his speech today, so I haven’t read it. (What? You want me to go look it up? I’m way too lazy for that; just ask Mary.) But Joe Biden was kind enough to send along his response, and one phrase particularly grabbed my imagination.

Among a litany of what he sees as the administration’s faults, he said "five years after 9/11, each member of the so-called ‘axis of evil’ is more
dangerous."

I got to thinking about it, and he’s got a point — about two out of the three, at least.

Well, the likes of Bush and Biden might talk about this stuff, but I’m a man of action. If things haven’t worked out with this Axis of Evil, I say let’s chuck it and get us a new one. The one we’ve got has been ornery and uncooperative, and with the whole world to choose from, I think we can do better. Yes, the current members will likely protest — indeed, Iran and North Korea have put a lot of effort into being evil lately, and they won’t think they deserve to get sent back down — but the country needs an Axis that we can unite behind and feel better about.

Our new Axis should consist of nations that are irritating enough to make the list, but less likely to cause so much trouble. They should be countries that we could take if we had to, but less likely to let things get to that point.

Just to start the ball rolling, I hereby present my Top Five candidates for the New Axis of Evil. Maybe y’all can suggest other likely objects of vilification, or at least help me winnow this one down:

France. They hate us already, and we don’t much like them. They won’t fight, but if they did we could finish it pretty cleanly. You can trust them — when they surrender, they really mean it. They already have the bomb, but they only use it to get a rise out of Greenpeace. I think we could do business with these guys.

Argentina. The Brits took Argentina all by themselves, when they were way past their prime. It has a temperate climate. If we need an excuse to invade, we can always claim that they’re still hiding Nazis. If we don’t find any, we can said they sent them to Chile just before we got there. I’ve always felt bad that the U.S. doesn’t pay enough attention to South America, so this would address that problem as well. (Sure, we could go with Venezuela, but Chavez wants in so badly, and I just wouldn’t want to give him the satisfaction.)

Russia. You might say we’d be biting off a bit much — they are much heavier hitters than any of the current lineup. But think about it: Back when they were a superpower, we stood toe-to-toe for 40-plus years, and it never came to blows (not directly, anyhow). And Putin’s been a real pain lately. Besides, they’ve got oil.

Switzerland. The whole civilized world has been fighting for a century, and these slackers have sat it out. What makes them so special? I’ve had it with them doing nothing but making cuckoo clocks and sitting on all our money. Sure, their Army has the benefit of some highly advanced pocketknife technology, but that doesn’t stack up so well against an F-18.

California. It thinks it’s a country already, even to the point of making treaties with our allies. Most Americans don’t like it any more than they like France — or not much more. Mainly, I just think Ahnold would be a much more fun to demonize than Dear Leader.

That’s my list so far. What do y’all think?

Chiracthin_1 Putinthin_2 Ahnoldthin_1

Sunday grownups column

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Dreaming of a world in which
grownups are in charge again
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
REMEMBER when everything from politics to marketing to fashion to entertainment was aimed at grownups?
Take television: While we kids owned Saturday morning (“Mighty Mouse” and such), prime time was keyed to the buttoned-down square world of people who had come up during the Depression and reached maturity — a sort of maturity most of us would never know — during the last war that this nation could get it together enough to see all the way through.
“Popular music” was made by these old guys in suits with short, slick hair who looked like they could as easily have been bankers. Perry Como. Andy Williams. The height of hipdom was Dean Martin. He showed he was daring and edgy by walking around with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Pretty sad. (A friend and I would compete as to who could more closely lampoon him: “Oooh, ah think ah’ll go over an’ sit on da cowch…”).
Every once in a while, they’d throw us a bone. Ed Sullivan, the squarest guy who ever lived, would on rare occasion devote five minutes of his hour presenting something “for you youngsters.” But when he said that, we never knew whether he would be bringing out the Rolling Stones or Topo Gigio, the talking mouse. These morsels were presented within an adult context, as curiosities from an alien culture that adults could smile down upon indulgently.
Once, these brothers called Smothers tried to have a show that was sort of different. But the grownups put a stop to that.
So much for popular culture.
Take politics. It was so quiet and low-key that for the longest time, I didn’t even know it existed. Ike had always been president. (I was born in 1953.) Then this shocking thing happened in 1960. Two guys stood before the nation asking us (asking the grownups) to pick between them to determine which one would replace Ike as president. It came down to a popularity contest. That brought the presidency down a bit in my estimation. Before that, if I had been familiar with the phrase, I would have assumed Ike was “president by the grace of God.”
I guess it never occurred to me that there was an alternative to Ike being president because back then, even political opponents accepted that that the president was the president, and were content to wait for the next election to have their say.
And when they had their say, they were so grown-up about it. No mindless pandering to voters’ selfish impulses. Go back and read excerpts from the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Forget how they looked. Their words were so lofty, so respectful, so intellectual, so well-informed. They debated like… grownups. It was weird.
Time passed, and I went off to college, just as things were starting to change a bit. (It’s a little-acknowledged fact that for most of us, the ’60s really didn’t happen until the ’70s. Go back and look at high school yearbooks; you’ll see what I mean.) Then I got married, went to work, had kids, and suddenly it was the ’80s.
MTV. I couldn’t believe it. It was like the very best few seconds that you might have squeezed out of a year of boring television in the early ’60s — only 24 hours a day, every day of the year. But I didn’t have much time for it. Work, mouths to feed. One maturing experience after another.
And then the millennium passed, and I looked around again, and the kids had taken over. In the grocery line, I was surrounded by headlines that would have insulted a 12-year-old’s intelligence in 1962. I flipped through the channels now available on television, and there was nothing on that any grown man would want to see. OK, there was “House.” But he was overwhelmed by programs that put such an ironic twist on the word “reality” that I guess it just goes over my head. Or under it.
(I did see one recently that my very grownup wife likes, but only because she likes anything with dancing. All you could hear throughout the show was the kind of screaming that you heard in small bits when The Beatles came on. Only this adolescent keening wasn’t for anything special or exciting; they screamed for everybody. They screamed when people said hello. Here’s the really weird part: What was this show about? People doing the fox trot. It was like Lawrence Welk with semi-nudity.)
Once, we played war with toy guns, and if we were really daring, we played marbles “for keeps.” Now, kids join gangs to play war with real guns. For keeps.
How did those who think and act on a childish level get to be in charge? I never got my turn.
That’s why I celebrated last weekend’s aggressive crackdown on underage drinking in an editorial headlined, “The grownups strike back in Five Points.” For once, maturity was asserting itself as dominant over the random raging of the ungoverned id. It gave me hope. I dared to dream.
In my dream, a swarm of determined grownups swoop down on the Democrats and Republicans, toss them all aside, and put up a couple of thinking adults for us to choose between for president.
They compete to see who can say the wisest and most mature things. They tell us we have to stop burning all that oil, and that we have to pay taxes to help come up with an alternative. They tell us that we have to accept the fact that we are the strongest country in the world, and that with that power comes responsibility. They tell us there’s no free lunch — on Social Security, Medicare or anything else. If we build in a flood plain or on a sandy beach, they tell us we should have known better, and maybe this will teach us something. They’ll say the FDA should regulate nicotine. They tell us to stop whining, sit up straight and eat our vegetables.
I’d vote happily for one of them. And if the other won, I’d respect that. I’d be a man about it.

David Brent advises Microsoft

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If you’re a fan of "The Office" — the original, of course, not the American imitation — you might want to take a look at the two "training videos" Microsoft commissioned from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. According to the WSJ, Microsoft is trying to run down who leaked these clips, which feature Gervais as nightmare boss David Brent, and were intended to be seen only by Microsoft employees.

The Gates crowd already got YouTube to take them down, but they’re still available on Google Video. Here are the links:

See David share the kind of business wisdom that got me where I am today.

The King is dead, but only technically

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We all know what today is. Even those of us who are forgetful, or those heathens who don’t swear fealty to The King, should know after this story was in the paper
yesterday.

The front-page promo for that story asked readers whether they remembered "where you were the day Elvis died."

Well, I should hope so, seeing as how I was probably the first human on the planet outside of Memphis to know of his reputed demise. I wrote a column about it on the 25th anniversary, which in honor of the occasion I will repeat in its entirety here:

ELVIS AND ME, OR, THE KING IS DEAD, BUT ONLY TECHNICALLY
Published on: 08/16/2002

By BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Page Editor
MY GOOD FRIEND Les Seago was the man who told the world that the King was dead. But before he told the world, he told me.
I’ve always appreciated that, even though it didn’t do me much practical good at the time.
On Aug. 16, 1977, Les was the chief Memphis correspondent for The Associated Press. I was the slot man on the copy desk of The Jackson Sun, which meant I had been at work since 5:30 a.m. By early afternoon, the paper was on its way to readers. I had also been a stringer for Les for years, and I was used to his calls to see what was going on in our area. But he didn’t have time for that this day.
Was it too late to get something in? he demanded. Well, yeah, it was, just barely, but why…?
It looks like Elvis is dead, he said, explaining quickly that he had a source, an ambulance driver from Baptist Hospital, who told him he had just brought Elvis in, and he was pretty sure that his passenger had been beyond help. Gotta go now, ‘bye.
He must have broken all speed records getting it confirmed, because I had just begun to tell my co-workers when the "bulletin" bell went off on the wire machine as it hammered out the news.
Les himself was found dead at his home two years ago, at age 61. Though his career had spanned many years and he had covered Martin Luther King’s assassination, The Associated Press identified him in his obituary
as the man "who filed the bulletin on the death of Elvis Presley." His ex-wife Nancy said "He wasn’t wild about Elvis, but he was glad that he did break the story." That was Les.
Sometime after that phone call, it struck me as odd that the ambulance driver had been less than sure that his passenger was dead. According to the details that later came out, it seems he would have been able to tell. Maybe they didn’t let him get close. I don’t know. But I remembered that uncertainty years later, when all the live Elvis sightings began to be reported. While it is my considered opinion that anyone who thinks they ran into the King at the Circle K is a couple of jelly doughnuts shy of a Graceland breakfast, the way the man lives on in the hearts of his fans is almost as hard to believe.
Don’t get me wrong. Elvis meant a lot to me, too. One of my family’s earliest home movies shows me at the age of 4, gyrating with a plastic guitar and shouting out "Hound Dog." I still think the kinetic essence of rock ‘n’ roll has never been expressed better than he did it in "Hard-Headed Woman." When my family moved to Memphis in 1971, I didn’t even know it was on the Mississippi River. But I knew that it was where Elvis lived.
Memphis was fond of Elvis, but in a calm sort of way. His last series of concerts in his hometown, at the Mid-South Coliseum, had to be extended to seven performances to accommodate the demand. (I was there for one of them. I sat close enough to learn how to do that hip-shaking thing, which I will only demonstrate on special occasions.) But the town never made a fuss over him. He was the King, but he was also just this guy who rode his motorcycle around town and occasionally dropped in at a dealership to buy a Cadillac for some complete stranger.
It was only after his death that he became an industry. That’s because, in a twist that Joseph Heller might have written, the whole world started coming to Memphis to see Elvis only after he wasn’t there anymore.
The craziness started a year after that phone call from Les. I was in Memphis covering the simultaneous police and fire strikes that were making national headlines. A group of us were hanging around outside the main police station downtown, waiting for something to happen, when something did — although we didn’t recognize it. A couple of really attractive French girls came up to us to ask, in broken English, how to find Graceland. We had all started trying to tell them by gesturing with our hands and speaking very loudly when some wise guy from The Tennessean showed us all up by giving them directions in French.
After they had left, we thought to wonder why they wanted to go to Graceland. Didn’t they know Elvis was gone?
A year after that, my paper sent me back to Memphis, this time to document the bizarre fact that people were still flocking to visit the King’s grave two whole years after his death. The Elvis industry was just starting to gear up in the Bluff City. I interviewed one of the first of a long line of Elvis impersonators, checked out a statue that was about to be unveiled, and went to Graceland.
In those days, the family was still living in the house, but they didn’t mind folks coming up the driveway to see the grave as long as we behaved. Nobody sold tickets. Uncle Vester Presley sat on a folding chair out at the oft-photographed front gate greeting everybody. That’s where the line began. After chatting with Uncle Vester, I wandered up the queue interviewing fans at random. They were from all over this country, plus a group from Leicester, England.
As respectful visitors gazed down at the graves of Elvis and Gladys, I talked with a young man with a walkie-talkie who was helping keep an eye on the crowd. He was one of E’s karate and racquetball buddies, now a sort of impromptu security guard and keeper of the flame. He must have liked my attitude, because he decided to share something special with me. Guiding me discreetly over to a corner of the house, he had me peer into the rear grounds. "See that ol’ pink Cadillac back there? No, back there… see it?" He went on in a hushed, reverent tone: "That’s the first car he bought his momma."
You can still see the pink Cadillac — for a price. You can even go inside Graceland now. You buy a ticket across the street, somewhere in that awful, plastic, glittery block full of trashy souvenir shops, and some stranger drives you over on a bus.
When we visited Memphis this year, some of my kids did the Graceland tour. They thought it was pretty cool. I think it helped them, who never knew the King, get a little more in touch with their essential Elvisness. As for me, I have yet to visit the Jungle Room. Elvis himself hasn’t invited me in. Yet.
Write to Mr. Warthen at bwarthen@thestate.com.

I would not be able to forget this anniversary even if I tried. Chris Roberts former reporter and computer whiz at The State, has brought me a jelly donut on this date each year for longer than I can remember. Even now that Chris has left the building to go teach at the university, he still manages to deliver. He sent the one pictured above via a colleague who was visiting the campus. Without that happy coincidence I’m not sure what he would have done, but Chris is a man sufficiently in touch with his essential Elvisness that he would have managed some way.

Thanyuh, Chris. Thankyuverimuch.

Elvises

Ricky Bobby reconsidered

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Having been warned away from "Talladega Nights," and having dutifully passed on the warning to you, I feel duty-bound to pass on any new evidence I encounter to the contrary.

I was sitting in a waiting room this morning, and had just heard via whatever "news" program was on the tube that always seems to be on in such places that the saga of Ricky Bobby had been the big money-maker over the weekend. This caused me to feel very superior to all those folks who had been duped into wasting their hard-earned means on something that I knew better than to go see.

Farrell1_1 Then I found, among all the magazines that I would never read (with titles like "Self," which I suppose is some sort of libertarian think tank journal), a copy of the Sporting News . In it was a "My Turn" column under the name of the fictional Mr. Bobby himself, under a picture of Will Farrell in his NASCAR outfit.

And it was funny, in a snickering sort of eighth-grade locker room kind of way — which means it was wittier than most of the comedies Hollywood turns out these days. If whoever actually wrote this had anything to do with writing the picture, maybe it’s better than I had heard.

And if they didn’t get this guy to write it, why not?

Talladega

Important warning

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Do not, repeat, do not go see "Talladega Nights."

You may think it will be in the classic, high-brow comedy genre as "Old School," but you would be wrong.

Two of my daughters went to see it. I, having a premonition, did not join them. My hunch was correct. The best parts were in the previews. Yes, it’s that bad.

Just providing this in the public interest. Of course, if you’re compiling a "Top Five Worst Movies Featuring Will Farrell in this Decade," you may be obliged to attend. Otherwise, stay away.

You’ve been warned.

bradwarthen.com

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