The Amazing Pumpkini

Remember, its not real journalism. It’s just an illusion.

It was a shabbily constructed weekend.

Assorted allergies ganged up on me, plus I’m becalmed in the Horse Latitudes of Finals here there and everywhere. Also I was the designated consoler and Chief Executive Listener for a friend who is freshly divorced. Nice guy, old pal, and about where I was a few years ago so I struggled manfully to not blurt out one of my own, battle-tested Theories Of Dating.

(Namely that if you have a conscience and are concerned about anything beyond finding a place to bunk your dick it’s a grim slog. Now if you are a conscience-free [not evil, mind you: just, as Billie Holliday used to say, “Don’t-Carish”. Sorta the lassie-faire school of getting laid] and are cool with transience, life can be good.

If not, it can be one long fucking retreat from Moscow. )

Instead I mostly listened.

So toss in a kind of pre-existing, structural exhaustion from work (still grateful I have employment, and still profoundly grateful it doesn’t involve getting shot at or stoop labor or taking an elevator a mile into the earth to start my day) and a particular flavor melancholy that visits me from time to time like a poor relation, and putting words together into well-turned rows has become like puddling iron into loose potting soil for the last few weeks.

The product comes out a lumpy, spongy, mutant grandchild of what I had intended: paragraphs from my brain temporarily packing in cosmoline that are chinked bluntly together out of third-best and next-best words that let the wind whistle through and the rain bluster in and soak the carpets.

It’ll pass – it always does – but it’s a damned nuisance when it happens.

And also has nothing whatsoever to do with why I didn’t watch David Blaine or the Kentucky Derby this weekend.

Now understand, I like magic.

And other than that one time when I was, well, “thrown” from a horse is both overly dramatic and factually incorrect. More like I fell out of sync with the critter and bounced right down his back and off his ass. But other than the unpleasantness of cactus needling, sore ass and the fact that it happened in front of my family, I like horses very much.

But I also like it when the hot dog is at-least-as-big-as-and-preferably-bigger-than the bun, and to get to Blaine’s trick or “And they’re off…”, you had to chew though a lot of dull, white bread.

And that’s boring.

I don’t bore easily, but unless you’re disappearing an Atlas rocket, lit, in the gantry, a magic trick should take a few minutes -- tops – and a magic show should be a series of tricks. So unless the “trick” was to get ABC to hand over two hours of airtime (Coulda re-run The Great Colbertini’s act -- making twenty-feet of reinforced Presidential Teflon vanish in front of 2,200 people -- 7-8 times in that interval, so there you go) the Blaine thingy was a bloated waste.

Ditto the Derby, writ slightly smaller. It starts, they run, and in two minutes we have a winn-ah! Unless you’re at a Derby Party, everything else is incidental music.

(Ditto NASCAR, IMO, but in the other direction. 400 miles of left turns? Interspersed with the occasional explosion?

OK, and then what?

You mean, that's it?

Maybe racing was a different beast when it was auto company against auto company and track innovations might make their way into next year’s model. When fuel was cheap and forever, and there was some relationship – however tenuous – between your beater and the cars down on the oval.

But now millionaire hillbillies race multi-million dollar spacecraft ‘round and ‘round, and Gatorade apparently uses astronaut testing facilities to design new, space-age sports-drink-nipple-“delivery systems” so that said millionaire hillbillies can have a simultaneous suck off of the corporate and electrolyte teats without taking their hand off of 10 and 2.)

Anyway, here’s the NYT on Blaine. It contains a Sekrit Coded Message for all Moonbats out there.
See if you can find it…

May 9, 2006
TV REVIEW
Thinking Up, and Overthinking, Stunts
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
The title exuded a certain pessimism: "David Blaine: Drowned Alive." On a live television special last night, Mr. Blaine, the obscurity-averse practitioner of spectacle, ended a weeklong submersion in 2,000 gallons of 96-degree saltwater, providing as the finale an attempt to break through chains while holding his breath for nine minutes. Would he survive, or would the world, as he put it in an interview before diving in, "see something pretty insane?"

Mr. Blaine, who had set up his human aquarium outside Lincoln Center, did not drown alive. Nor did he set the world record for holding his breath, as he had hoped — a record set at 8 minutes and 58 seconds. Instead, he emerged from the tank, requiring oxygen after 7 minutes and 8 seconds, and told the crowd that had gathered that he had had a difficult week and that "I love you all."

This, of course, was not the desired outcome for someone whose preparation included training with the Navy Seals and losing 40 pounds to decrease his body mass and make breathlessness easier. Yet, the absurd seriousness with which Mr. Blaine approaches his public stunts leaves you with a certain glee at his failure.
It is a sign of the pumped-up intensity around his whole enterprise that "David Blaine: Drowned Alive" commanded two hours on ABC.
…

In dreamy montages last night, Mr. Blaine explained that these exercises are all part of his "journey," that they "make people think." Magic, he said, "brings people together who might not come together." Well, so does the airport.

The beauty of old-school thrill seekers like Evel Knievel, whose interview with Mr. Blaine ran during the show, is that they did not seek to intellectualize their gamesmanship.

When Mr. Blaine looks for insight into why he does what he does, Mr. Knievel responds without any effort at introspection: "You're a daredevil," he says. "You can't help it."

See, more often than not, simplicity carries the day.

Not simple-mindedness -- I guarantee you that Evel Knievel didn’t just jump on a bike and roar into his stunts without a lot of care and prep -- but simplicity.

A clarity of purpose. An “I will now make quarters shoot out of your nose” straightforwardness that tells the audience exactly why they are about to see, and why they should care.

Colbert had it when he put on his Big Giant O’Reilly Head, sank his teeth into Dubya’s leg, and would not let go.

Richard Feynman had it when he used a naught but a nipple-clamp (OK, it was a C-clamp, but you wanna wager which'll get a student’s attention quicker?) and a glass of ice water to blow those NASA flaks who were trying to run a fast, rocket-science ramadoola on the simple truth about why the Challenger blew up completely out of the room .

Murtha did it. Cronkite did it. Gandi and Groucho both did it, each in his own domain.

Hell, Reagan did it when he demanded the Berlin Wall be torn down.

Its telling the simple truth or asking the simple question that flummoxes your opponent.

Keeping it clean and clear and persisting until the other guy has to run away, kill your mike, admit they were full of shit, or Rove it up -- start ranting out more lies and calling you nasty names for daring to ask such questions in the first place.

And Roving it up doesn't work so good anymore.

The trick is, don’t be distracted. Like stage magic, never take the hand that is offered and never look where your eye is being drawn.

So take, for example, Fat Tim and his Sunday Puppet show.

He let ambulatory shitsack Tom Delay burble his verbal rat poison and Wingnut stool softener virtually unchecked and unchallenged. Ah but when Howard Dean came on? Nancy Pelosi? Suddenly Timmuh decides to leap into action and get confrontational as he strives mightily to make this about Raising Taxes.

You gonna raise taxes. Huh? Are ya? Are ya? Huh?

Then Timmuh strives mightily to make this about Impeachment.

You gonna Impeach. Huh? Are ya? Are ya? Huh?

Then Timmuh positively outdoes himself in his chosen field of conspicuously covering fake news and non-issues by “interviewing” Steve Fucking Bridges. Senor Fake Bush. He stiff-arms his panel and D&Cing the subderma beneath the bottom of the Mouse Circus barrel, actually devotes the kind of time to a Rich Little he would ordinarily give a head of state or Nobel Laureate or activist billionaires.

Fat Tim: How aware are you are a comedian of that line you can’t cross with the Preznit.

Fake Bush: I don’t wanna be mean.

Holy shit. It just went on and on and on. I guess we can expect Punkin’ Haid to cede the next 15 minutes to Steve Colbert?

Waiting. Waiting. Crickets. Sun whipping around the sky “Time Machine” style. Waiting.

No?

(Colbert is, these days, nowhere mentioned but everywhere present. From the yawning non-mention on Sunday, to Richard Cohen actually going out of his way to re-pick a fight with bloggers about how mean they are and how Cohen Knows Funny! Oh, God bless these flapjawed simpletons for keeping Mr. Colbert firmly seated like the Ghost of Banquo at the table, and reminding us again that he does not simply ring the political doorbell at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, leave burning bags of dog poo on the stoop and run.

No he rolls his hibachi into the White House mess and prepares individual servings of burning poo at their tables, Benihana style.)

Dean was good and Pelosi was good because they saw Tim for what he was and always has been. A Power Groupie. A bit of Republican eye-sparkle feigning journalism, willing to blow in the whatever direction the breeze prevails.

Jane Hamsher posting at Huffington has what sounds like a very plausible explanation for why Punkin’ Haid is so grievous and nekkid in his sins, but I like a remedy that she implies into her final paragraph even more:

The next time Russert and Matthews start piddling in their sneakers at the thought of Democrats with subpoena power, I think it's time to remember that it's not even their beloved Republicans they fear for, and given their ecstatic participation in the Cliniton hunt it sure isn't the public interest. Could it be their own large, pale posteriors that fear exposure? Is that why they're working overtime to perpetuate GOP narratives and attempting to spread their own personal fears into the hearts of their viewers at the specter of Congressional oversight?

Seriously, he nearly peed himself at the suggestion that Democrats might want to do what Republicans refuse to do: investigate high crimes, corruption and incompetence and then bring to book those that are to blame.

And the solvent for that kind of lard is not to overthink it.

Don’t follow the offered brightly-colored scarves, or gett dazzled by the flashbang pyrotechnics. The solution is to keep it keep it simple and clear and remember that Russert (for example) is, for all intents and purposes, a White House operative who occasionally gets bent and cranky over side issues, but will always come to obedient heel over the big stuff.

He is not a journo. He is not in any sense “objective”. He’s not wearing a blue helmet, so why treat him like he is?

Why not come right back at him? Why not simply and directly ask Tim Russert why he doesn’t believe crimes and incompetence at the highest levels of government should be investigate?

Why anyone lying a nation into a war shouldn’t be prosecuted?

Why our 2,400 dead children deserve anything less?

Update: (For any civic-minded citizens, turns out Mr. Russert is heading out on a book tour very shortly.

It is, I understand, a ticketed event, and I don’t have the particulars, but in the cause of fearlessly ferreting out the truth no matter where it takes you – a motive I’m sure Mr. Russert would find nothing but noble – I would be interested in hearing from anyone who finds an opportunity to ask him one or two firm-yet-civil question about his journalistic slovenliness and biases.)