June 2009 Archives
It ill behooves a humorist to take a public position on another comic's jokes, so I'll just say that people, like Chris Matthews, who abjure Letterman's "knocked up" joke on grounds that the language is unacceptably rough must have missed the fact that a major movie studio released a picture by that very title to wide public support.
But, as to Sarah Palin's response: I'm gratified to see one politician who sees fit to avoid the current fad of pretending to have a sense of humor. Who hasn't gagged as Senators and other supposed dignitaries have trooped onto the stages of Dave, Jay, Conan, Jon, Steve, and SNL to demonstrate their "good to have a beer with" credentials? I will never forget being on Bill Maher's old "Politically Incorrect" when Sen. Orrin Hatch showed up with a memorized sheaf of witticisms cranked out by his staff, and delivered each one the way the morning paper is delivered: with a plop, usually ending up wet. Like other pols on the same mission, Sen. Hatch made only two mistakes: he had his jokes crafted by political, rather than comedy, professionals, and he uttered them with all the comic timing of a C-SPAN speech.
Governor Palin, on the other hand, stood proud as someone incensed by joking. I for one think our politicians should have an adversarial relationship with humor, and vice versa. That's healthy for the country.
I'm also glad to see Governor Palin attacking Dave's japes for contributing to a serious problem; "no wonder young women have such low self-esteem", she said of joking about sexual indiscretions with minors. I therefore anticipate with great eagerness the governor's next assault against a social force that causes young women to have low self-esteem, namely, the numberless pageants where, from age 4 upwards, such women are persuaded by their parents and other elders into tarting up and parading in states of garish overdress and unbecoming undrerdress before judges I'd trust around young women a lot less than Dave.
Carrie Prejean, for example, gained a national platform for her views purely because such eminences judged her most toothsome in a bathing suit. I'm sure Governor Palin recognizes the damage that does to the self-image of young women who aspire to be acknowledged for what they know or what they can do, not how well they can pad out the top of a swimsuit.
Oh, wait.
Never mind.
06/03/09 12:53 AM
The Mainstream Media Keep Getting New Orleans Wrong
Full disclosure: I'm a New Orleanian, not by birth but by adoption. We adopted each other, New Orleans and me. While some of my friends, who suffered no damage from the 2005 floods, used the moment to flee the city (and even to denounce it in the New York Times), I saw the moment as more akin to what you do when a stranger hideously attacks your loved one: unless you're Newt Gingrich (who famously demanded a divorce from his first wife on her cancer bed), you don't abandon her. You cleave to her, and defend her.
"Immediately after the storm, many residents, often African Americans, worried that low-lying flood-ravaged neighborhoods would be left unbuilt and turned into wetlands."
As I watched New Orleans flood, from my birth home in Los Angeles, then read the dispatches appearing over the next few weeks in the remarkably reborn New Orleans Times-Picayune, a strange awareness arose. The national media placed the "Katrina" story in a couple of handy templates: a natural disaster story, and a story of the suffering of African Americans at the hands of an unfeeling Republican administration. What local media--also including WWL Radio and WWL and WDSU TV--reported was that flooding, and suffering, extended far and wide throughout the metropolitan area, to rich and poor neighborhoods, black and white neighborhoods, urban and suburban neighborhoods. And they began, as October turned to November, to report results of on-the-ground investigations, by distinguished engineers working pro bono, that showed the levees hadn't been overtopped, that Katrina was not what flooded New Orleans (even though it whacked the Mississippi Gulf Coast), that the floods were triggered by more than four dozen breaches in levees and floodwalls that had been poorly designed and constructed under the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. US taxpayers, in short, had paid billions over four decades to flood New Orleans.
We're almost four years on, and national media reporters still like to fly into the city, root about for a new change on the familiar story, and jet back out. Latest example: this, from the Los Angeles Times (yes, complaining about accuracy in that paper is like regretting that skunks don't emit Chanel #5). High up in the story, the reporter, who's doing a piece about supposed continuing controversy over whether the city's footprint should be shrunk and how that controversy is "tak(ing) on a new racial dimension", writes this:
Utilizing an almost Cheneyesque skill at conflation and elision, the reporter leaves in the reader's mind the notion that those "flood-ravaged neighborhoods", like the Lower Ninth Ward, are all "low-lying". Perhaps the reporter, like so many out-of-towners, misinterprets the name of the district; in fact, the "Lower" in the name refers to the neighborhood's location on the river, downriver from the French Quarter and Garden District (the latter of which is Uptown). In fact, many parts of the city that flooded during "Katrina" had never before flooded. They weren't low-lying, but lying in the direct path of water unleashed by catastrophic levee breaches.
And, though New Orleans is in the midst of racial controversies, they tend to circulate around the legacy of Mayor Nagin, the battles between the new city council and the Mayor's functionaries, and the issues surrounding health-care and housing for the working poor.
One of these days, a few years on, someone in the mainstream media--assuming it still exists--will win a Pulitzer for discovering what New Orleanians have known since August 30, 2005.
06/02/09 11:45 AM
The Man of Ideas
As far back as the time when he was selling videotapes of his lectures at a relatively obscure college, Newt Gingrich has marketed himself as a man of ideas. You could do a credible impression of the man (at least I did) just by dropping the names "Deming and Drucker" into every other sentence, and the words "American civilization" into every other paragraph.
And now, back out of power and back into the media, Speaker Gingrich (as likes to be called) is again marketing himself as a man of ideas. "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" sprang from Gingrich's fertile idea farm last summer, and spread to the McCain campaign. "Twelve American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity" is a new campaign we'll surely hear more about.
Yet, in the past three weeks, the man of ideas has launched stunningly vituperative campaigns against two women: Nancy Pelosi and Sonia Sotomayor. One would expect the ex-speaker to disagree with these people, but the ideas he's been propagating have been, in the cast of Pelosi, the ideas that she's "disgusting" and "trivial", and, in the case of Sotomayor, that she's a "racist". He demanded that Pelosi resign and that Sotomayor withdraw her nomination.
Apparently, when you're running a non-campaign campaign for the leadership of the Republican party, those are what pass for Ideas. What would Deming and Drucker think?
Harry Shearer
