Skipping Church

I will be skipping church today. Every now and then it’s nice to experience a two day weekend, so I can better relate to my un-churched friends. My church is in the middle of it’s annual Israel-a-thon featuring something called the “Watchman On The Wall”, which sounds perfectly dreadful. The church website features not only this Watchman thing but also an April pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and coming soon, a “first Friday Shabbat”. Perhaps we should just declare ourselves a temple and be done with it.

But, luckily for me, there’s no law that says that you have to be fully on board with everything your church does to remain a member. Grove certainly has enough good qualities to compensate for this particular annoyance, so I’ll skip the “Israel can do no wrong” love fest again this year and enjoy a Sunday at home.

Inquiring readers might like to know what I will be doing instead. I will be serving as Pam’s low skilled, poorly paid manual labor in her latest campaign to makeover our house. This arrangement works quite well actually, since I have no appreciable interior design gifts, and therefore no strongly held opinions on the subject. Pam, on the other hand, while sometimes wracked with indecision and plagued by the lethargy that it produces, once sufficiently inspired, becomes a whirlwind of activity, grabbing everything that isn’t nailed down at Hobby Lobby and Khol’s, and making online purchases until 2 in the morning. After last night’s internet shopping breakthrough, Pam has enough Khol’s cash to become a majority shareholder.

So, today I will hang curtain rods, mirrors, and wall clocks. I will reach the spots that she can’t as a month of painting begins. Before she’s finished, the downstairs bathroom, the kids’ bathroom, the breakfast nook and Patrick’s old bedroom will have new coats of paint and be redecorated from wall switch cover to curtains and everything in between. The transformation will be complete with only hours to spare before a bunch of kids from a traveling choir from Belmont come to stay beginning the first weekend in March.

My wife is awesome.

Celebrity Gun Control

Sometimes in life, irony is subtle. It is found only after deep thought or revelation. Then other times it screams at us like the angry lead singer of a high school metal band.

One such occasion occurred this week when Sylvester Stallone issued a ringing endorsement of gun control. Even the headline writer at the Huffington Post could see the irony…”Bullet To The Head star doesn’t see value in assault weapons”

I suppose it isn’t quite fair to single out Rambo. He had plenty of help from several other celebrities this week. At a press conference in support of Obama’s gun control initiative, that famous authority on firearms, Tony Bennett, came up with this gem…

”It's the kind of turn that happened to the great country of Germany, when Nazis came over and created tragic things, and they had to be told off. And if we continue this kind of violence and accept it in our country, the rest of the world's going to really take care of us, in a very bad way.”

Tony probably shouldn’t have mentioned Nazi Germany in a discussion of gun control, since no country in modern times had tighter gun control laws than the Nazi’s. And I’m sure it will come as a surprise to the soldiers of the 101^st airborne that the Nazi’s were defeated when we “told them off”. How does Mr. Bennett think that the citizens of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece, fought back against their German invaders? With what did their underground resistance movements defend themselves? The headline read, “Tony Bennett says that without gun control U.S. may end up like Nazi Germany”. Apparently, his heart wasn’t the only thing Tony left in San Francisco.

Not to be outdone, comedian Chris Rock followed Bennett to the microphone with this savvy advice…

 "The President and the first lady are kind of like the Mom and the Dad of the country. And when your Dad tells you something, you listen, and when you don’t it ends up biting you in the ass.”

　

Thanks Chris. It’s good to know that we’re all children.

Seriously, for those of you who support the President’s gun control efforts, please tell your celebrity supporters to shut up. They’re not helping.

Drones And Our Philosopher King

It’s taken me several days to process the startling news of the leaked memo from the White House concerning our philosopher-king’s new and improved license to kill. It seems that the phrase “imminent danger” now means something closer to, “seems suspicious”.

With the rise of the drone as a neat, clean, killing tool, governments can now exert their will with a single machine rather than having to go to the expense and aggravation of marshaling troops and public opinion to support their foreign policy objectives. Under former President Bush, drones were used to go after Al-Qaeda types hiding in straw-roofed huts in Pakistan. This President has managed to make Bush look like a weak kneed pacifist, wracking up kill after kill of swarthy terrorist types along with any innocent friends and neighbors who were unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. Instead of Code Pink protesters swarming Pennsylvania Avenue with signs screaming, ”Obama=Murderer”, this killing frenzy has been greeted with silence by the left. But with the release of this memo, even the most sycophantic members of the loyal press are snapping out of their hero worship long enough to think about how awful this new power would be in the hands of a future (shudder) Republican President!

The new policy gives the President the authority to order drone strikes against even American citizens abroad who the President believes might be a threat to national security, but with the new meaning of words made famous by this administration, the lack of specific prohibitions against killing Americans on American soil gives pause. That slacker Bush toiled under the timid definition of “imminent threat” which restricted the kill order to Americans involved in activities that actually  constituted an imminent grave danger. For example, surveillance cameras pick up Joe packing the back of his van with a thousand sticks of dynamite, while on the front seat there’s a street map of Washington DC with the Pentagon circled by a red sharpee, along with a worn copy of the Koran. That’s an “imminent” threat. Under this new definition of “imminent”, all it might take is intelligence reports that Joe was seen in the middle east aisle of the local library checking out biographies of Bin Laden then going to an Arab film festival, smoking a Hookah pipe and drinking really strong coffee.

I’m fully aware that there are some weirdoes in America. Among my fellow citizens there lives every strata of social and political deviants known to exist on the planet. But, the idea that we would allow any one man or woman to possess the power of judge, jury, and executioner of one of our fellow citizens is an outrage and an insult to our founding documents. In the 236 year history of this nation, there isn’t one single President who I would trust with this power, and few who would even dare want such authority. With such flimsy evidentiary standards as those advanced in this memo, every American citizen should be appalled at so stunning a power grab, at such an evisceration of due process.

So far, the only thing we Americans can manage to be appalled by is the possible loss of the Hostess Twinkie.

My Dad and Thomas Jefferson

The other night, I read the final two chapters of Jon Meacham’s “Art of Power”, his masterful biography of Thomas Jefferson. The great old man was dying. In painstaking detail, Meacham described the physical struggles and bouts of melancholy that plagued him in his last days. But to the end, Jefferson’s mind still had moments of clarity, and in those moments his thoughts were of the great events of the revolution, and his obsession with the well being of his family.

After the last page was read, I sat in silence for awhile, as I often do in such moments, trying to take it all in, trying to process so monumental a life, so magnificently lived. Jefferson was a great man with admittedly great flaws, but remains one of the few men from history with whom I would love to have dinner.

As I sat there staring off into the distance thinking of Monticello, my cell phone began to vibrate on the reading table beside me. It was an e-mail from my sister. My Dad had fallen now for the third time in one day. Something was wrong. Suddenly, his legs had become weak and his gate unreliable. We would take him to the doctor and discover a badly swollen leg and foot. He would be admitted to the hospital for treatment of the infection.

So for the next several days we will all visit him there. We will monitor his progress, and sit with him when we can. He will make it as easy as possible on us by being cheerful. He will be grateful for every visit. He will make conversation even though he would rather sleep. He will eat whatever awful food is put in front of him. He will inform me of the latest news of the world as I marvel at how he manages to be so peaceful, while his body continues to betray him.

While Thomas Jefferson was the great man of history, my Dad has always been, and still remains the great man of my life.

Beyonce's Show

I suppose that I should begin this post with a warning. You are about to enter an “old fuddy-duddy zone”. Watching Beyonce’s halftime show the other night made me feel every day of my 54 years and then some. It was a twenty minute blitzkrieg on the senses that left me exhausted and bewildered.

This woman has an incredible voice, but she is no singer. She is an exhibition, an object of fantasy. Within the first two minutes, she tore off the wrapping paper of her outfit and flung it into the crowd, and performed the rest of her show dressed like a Victoria’s Secret mannequin. Amidst dazzling pyrotechnics and pulsing video images, she showed 108 million viewers more athletic ability than Joe Flacco ever dreamed of having. Her dance moves were pure eroticism. She gyrated and hip-thrusted across the stage like a Las Vegas showgirl on steroids. What actual singing she did seemed beside the point, a mere accessory to her sexual objectification. When it was all over I wasn’t quite sure what I had seen. It certainly wasn’t a vocal performance, more like an X-rated jazzercise workout. I certainly had gotten a workout. I suppose after several years of worn out rockers like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, the Super Bowl people felt that some youth, energy and vitality needed to be injected into the proceedings. Mission accomplished.

The Super Bowl has become the image America projects once a year to the world, and each year it gets bigger, louder and more aggressive. It’s an all out assault of glitz, an extravaganza of frenzied energy. The world would be forgiven for thinking that America may very well have lost it’s mind. Is this who we are? The numbers say yes.

In the middle of it all came the voice of Paul Harvey, a recording of a speech he made in 1978 to a meeting of the Future Farmers of America. My television was treated to two minutes of still photographs, showing that most unglamorous thing, hard, back-breaking, solitary work. There were no swelling violins, no music of any kind, just silent images of the country we used to be before the Super Bowl, quiet, steady and decent. Harvey’s words sounded like poetry to me.

Next year it will be even bigger, bolder, louder. The technology will be cutting edge, the envelope will once again be pushed. Maybe Justin Bieber will do the halftime show. He might rip off his shirt. Can’t wait.

The Super Bowl vs. The Dowager Countess

Super Bowl XCVII is now in the books. There was plenty of violence, ridiculous strategy, confusion, moments of laughter, and times that made you want to cry. The game? No, I’m talking about the commercials.

Loved the Clydesdale ad, but can’t for the life of me figure out how it is supposed to make me want to drink Budweiser. On the other hand, the Dodge ad featuring the voice of Paul Harvey talking about God creating a farmer on the eighth day of creation was a two minute long masterpiece that had me seriously considering selling my Cadillac CTS and buying a pick up truck. The similarly long Jeep ad showing soldiers coming home from war lost me when I heard Oprah’s voice, since I associate so many negative things with her.

There were some funny ads too, the Oreo spot particularly so, as it revived the “great taste-less filling” battles of twenty five years ago. The scene featuring a police officer whispering into a bull horn was classic. However, the most delicious line of the night belonged not to a Super Bowl commercial, but to the Dowager Countess over on Downton Abbey.

Violet had summoned Dr. Clarkson to her house for a meeting in an attempt to get him to change his story about the events that led to Cybil’s death. The controversy had caused a serious breach in Robert and Cora’s marriage, and Violet was doing serious damage control. The good doctor objected to Violet’s request on the grounds that he found it very difficult to tell an intentional lie, to which we were all treated to this classic exchange:

Dr. Clarkson: I find it very difficult to lie.

Violet: Do you and I have nothing in common? “Lie”…is so unmusical a word.

If, the next time I enter a voting booth, The Dowager Countess is on the ballot as a candidate for President, I will cast my first joyful vote in thirty years!

Racist Commercials. It's All The Fault Of The Berenstain Bears.

For several years now, the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl have featured organizations of the aggrieved calling press conferences to discuss racist commercials. This year there are two that I’m aware of, but I’m sure there are more. The offending companies are Coke and Volkswagen as follows.

The Coke commercial features a swarthy young man of middle eastern extraction on a camel in the middle of a desert. It is hot and he peers out on the horizon and sees a giant cold bottle of Coke, oasis-like in the distance. Suddenly a group of Mad-Max types come roaring by on motor cycles, racing towards the Coke. The race is soon joined by a busload of chorus girls equally thirsty and intent on getting there first. Meanwhile, our Arab man is seen tugging desperately on the reins of his camel who refuses to budge. When the contestants reach the bottle they discover that it was just a sign advertising Coke and that in fact the Coke bottle is another 50 miles down the road. End of ad.

I will now quote someone from something called the “American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee”….

“Why is it that Arabs are always shown as either oil-rich sheiks, terrorists, or belly dancers? The Coke commercial for the Super Bowl is racist, portraying Arabs as backward and foolish Camel Jockeys, and they have no chance to win in the world.”

Ok. First of all, the Arab shown in this commercial was neither an oil-rich sheik, a terrorist, nor a belly dancer. He appeared to be an ordinary run of the mill Arab man, a Joe Camel, as it were. In addition, not only did he have no chance to “win” the bottle of Coke, nobody else did either, which was the whole point, as far as I could tell, of this moronic ad in the first place. The last thing I thought when watching this commercial was that it was possibly offensive to Arab-Americans. However it was offensive to viewers like me, expecting hilarious and inventive ads during the Super Bowl. Now, it WOULD have been racist, offensive, and much more awesome, if after the Mad-Max guys and the showgirls reached the Coke bottle, our sweaty Arab man reached into his vest and pressed a red button detonating a bomb hidden inside the bottle blowing them all to smithereens!

　

The second offending commercial features a dreary office building filled with drearily dressed middle-management Minnesotans. They crowd into a dreary elevator and someone bemoans how much they hate Mondays. Then a very white man in the back of the elevator speaks in a rich Jamaican accent, “Don’t worry mon, everyting is gonna be alllright!” Later we see four equally white men riding to lunch in a hot red VW Beatle, all deliriously happy and speaking fluent Jamaican. The tag line of the ad is…Get In. Get Happy.

A New York Times columnist instantly declared the commercial, ”blackface with voices”. A CNN critic was appalled at the suggestion that “all black people are happy”. All of the perpetually aggrieved media groups failed to ask the Jamaican government and it’s tourism officials what they thought of the condescending, racist suggestion that Jamaicans are happy. When some intrepid reporter finally did he discovered that they were thrilled with the commercial, and terribly “happy” about the publicity.

Now that the subject of racist ads has been broached by our media, I would like to get in on the action. Just the other day, I was greatly offended and perhaps permanently scared by another vicious ad by the people at Volkswagen. The scene is a suburb somewhere, peaceful streets, finely trimmed front yard, with a white man still wearing a shirt and tie throwing a baseball with his son. All is well until we see the father trying to teach his son “how” to throw the ball. He winds up and makes the most pathetically unathletic attempt at throwing a ball seen in this country since FDR threw out the first pitch in the 1938 World Series. Picture a girl in the midst of an epileptic seizure trying to throw a ball and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how bad it was. The tag line of the ad encourages the viewer to buy a Volkswagen so…“you can have something worthy of passing down to your son”.

Seldom in my life have I seen such a brutally racist ad. It plays on the vicious stereotype of the white suburban man’s lack of athletic ability as well as his total lack of self-awareness. This is just the latest in a long line of advertisements depicting white men as inept morons, clueless fathers, and shiftless bums who not only lack athleticism but are totally devoid of ambition, any sense of fashion, and the slightest inkling of romance. If an anthropologist from 200 years in the future were to appear on our shores and his only information about our culture was derived from watching television commercials, he would no doubt conclude that white men were the scourge of the planet.

This all started with the most subversively vile books ever written…The Berenstain Bears. I remember being at first slightly annoyed when I started reading them to my unsuspecting children. Every story was the same. Brother and Sister Bear encounter some problem. They first consult Papa Bear, the dumb as a box of rocks father, who invariably gives moronic advice that when followed results in a world of trouble. Enter Mama Bear, the mother/savior of Socratean brilliance who with characteristic patience, foreBEARance, and common sense saves the day by giving the “correct” advice. Of course, Sister Bear is twice the athlete of Brother Bear who shows early signs of being equally as helpless as the old man. The fact that this family of brown bears live in a tree is never explained, neither is the fact of what Mother Bear could possibly have seen in Father Bear back in the day that could have led her to want to marry such a clod. The first of these wretched titles appeared in 1962. America began to see commercials featuring inept manhood shortly thereafter. Coincidence? I think not!