Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his wife Joyce arrive for a social dinner in honor of Britain’s Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)
This week we made funny with:
Chris Ware’s eavesdropping, sexist cripples!
Elmore Leonard’s alcoholic spinsters and blood-thirsty lawmen!
“You shot the four guys who drove their car into the roadhouse that time, all of them coming out armed and standing fairly close. One of ’em, Nestor Lott, the ex-federal agent gone bad, packed two .45’s cinched to his legs. Nestor pulled on you and you shot him and turned and shot the other three.” Gary paused.
Carl said: “This friend of Peyton’s, Venicia Munson, was an old-maid schoolteacher who drank Peyton’s wildcat whiskey and didn’t care who knew it. We’re sitting in her kitchen waiting for Peyton to show, she told me she was scared to death. I said, ‘Well, that’ll teach you to get mixed up with a bank robber.’ She said: ‘You’re the one scares me, not Peyton. I can tell you’d rather shoot him than bring him in.’ She said it was why I became a marshal, to get to carry a gun and shoot people.”
And Firoozeh Dumas’ racially-profiled family!
As soon as my father showed up, we started singing “Happy Birthday” in English. It would have been more natural for us to sing in Persian, but if you are part of a large Middle Eastern contingency these days, you’re already scaring people. Add to that a loud song with guttural sounds and clapping, and you have passengers speed-dialing the Department of Homeland Security.
Previously: More Hilarity from the New York Times Magazine’s “Funny Pages,” and As Seen On The New York Times Magazine’s “Funny Pages”
As Slate has been less-than-stellar about maintaining “The Breakfast Table,” a once-beloved feature that, regrettably, has since been allowed to languish, we asked the site’s editor Jacob Weisberg for permission to license it for our own usage, and he, of course, agreed, recognizing that low culture has always outshone his own tepidly downtrodden site in all the ways that matter, but most notably in the manner in which we’ve historically been very strong at using the format of two disparate-yet-complementary experts weighing in on the issues of the day. Also, he acknowledged how great we were with excessively long and unnecessarily verbose introductory sentences. He’s a good editor.
And with that, we introduce our two “Breakfast Table” panelists for this leisurely Friday afternoon; first, we have one Alex Pareene, a student of dramaturgical matters and working-class struggle, and Jean-Paul Tremblay, a self-employed and self-professed expert in theatrical composition and post-Jamesonian Marxism.
From: Jean-Paul Tremblay
To: Alex Pareene
Subject: Scooting out the door?
Friday, October 28, 2005, at 2:06 AM EST
Alex:
I probably shouldn’t be starting our exchange yet, because it’s not yet dawn and I just got back from the loudest, most raucous fucking dress rehearsal ever, but I just got a hunch on the cab ride home from the theater that Libby’s going to go down today. I’ve traced this idea to a realization I had while watching my play’s lead actor limp around onstage in crutches, whereupon I saw that if the character had been unable to afford healthcare, we’d have had to reformat the setpieces such that the entire play was comprised of a conversation on a couch. Which’d be far more David Rabe than Luigi Pirandello, and you know how much I go for an early twentieth-century motif with my body of work. Anyways, the dude’s in crutches. And so is Libby, and Libby has money, and the crutches are his means of power…the money is the crutch. And the disability is his means of power. And if he’s indicted today, and goes down, it’ll totally be this unjust transfer of power. Why do I ingest so much ketamine when working with these dress rehearsals? I have to stop. It fucks with my mind and logistical reasoning.
From: Alex Pareene
To: Jean-Paul Tremblay
Subject: Puttin’ On the Fitz
Friday, October 28, 2005, at 10:25 AM EST
Jean-Paul,
Pirandello, my friend, was an inspired reference — seeing Scooter Libby “go down,” as you put it, brought to mind nothing so much as Pirandello’s Enrico IV. Scooter, of course, is Berthold the valet. I see Cheney as the doctor and Judy Miller as Donna Matilda. The “mad” king is America itself, and today we learned that she is tired of wearing her mask.
“I just got a hunch,” you say. I keep coming back to those words. Hunches and crutches, those tired dramatic devices. The hunch, Richard III’s power, repugnant but impossibly attractive. The Neo-liberal hegemony fuctions in almost exactly the same fashion. And the crutch — not money, I think, but the classical liberal ideal of the social contract. It’s weakness, it’s bathos, the greatest enemy of neo-liberal society. I’ve been revising my musical revue of historical materialism (“Sing, Sang, Materialistische GeschichtsauffasSung!”), so my thoughts are a bit scattered at the moment, but I think the entire leak investigation can be read as a critique of the Annales school’s perversion of Marxist historiography. I’ll tell you what I mean by that as soon as I finish skimming the Wikipedia entry about them.
From: Jean-Paul Tremblay
To: Alex Pareene
Subject: uggggh
Friday, October 28, 2005, at 4:04 PM EST
Alex, boyo,
It’s really late in the afternoon, and I just woke up. Sorry about that. This is where the deconstructionist punster in me says, “Guess I missed ‘breakfast,’ huh?” And where you, the audience, groan.
Such audience participation is really what this whole Plame investigation was all about, I feel…with contributions from a range of professions as diverse as journalists and chiefs of staff. My theatrical production, premiering tonight, is derived from this participatory spirit, wherein I hope workers laboring within the coils of both Media and Government can unite to applaud the work of my crippled lead actor. Crippled by a staggering deficit, an astoundingly piss-poor educational system, and exposure to too much reality television.
In that vein, it’s good to know that the populace will be focusing on possible jail time for this Libby fellow. Which, perversely, could be a boon for all of academia…just think of what Antonio Gramsci produced while in prison. I’ve often thought about adapting his “Prison Notebooks” for the stage, but have consistently come up short in this regard. Whom would I cast as “Hegemony,” as you so briefly touch upon above? And in terms of undertaking such an adaptation, I never understood “hermeneutics” very much, to be honest.
I feel like such a sham. When people view my play tonight, they’re going to know how phony I am, and how much I’ve borrowed from the Italian master. “Six Characters in Search of an Author”? I feel like my rendition is more akin to “A Nobody in Search of Some Credibility.”
I hope you can make it. Coming by my show, I mean. I know you’ll “make it” in all the other ways that matter, kid. You’ve got talent. Me? I feel like I’m about to pull a Benjamin and shoot myself.
From Wednesday’s Entertainment Weekly Popwatch!
Who knew cult director Darren Aronofsky was a fan of the boob tube? The Requiem for a Dream helmer has just signed on to direct an episode of ABC’s Lost, which will likely air at the beginning of May sweeps… “We will try to put together a story that will be well-suited for Darren’s talents and visual imagination.”
So what can we expect from Aronofsky’s turn behind the camera? low culture has the exclusive preview, but beware, SPOILERS AHEAD!
Hurley grows increasingly crazed when he starts using amphetamines as an appetite suppressant.
Charlie’s heroin habit hits an all-time low.
Those damned amputees are finally explained.
And someone’s eye figures as a visual cue… But whose?
NB: The Kate-Claire “Ass to Ass” scene is too graphic to be shown here.
by JACOB LINDSTROM
SPECIAL SCHOOL PAPER CORRESPONDENT
I’ll tell ya, if there’s one thing a young columnist likes me dislikes more than irresponsible kids doing irresponsible things, it’s irresponsible adults doing irresponsible research. How else to explain the occurrence of yet another media frenzy about kids and their newsgathering sources?
Today’s Romenesko (a daily news and gossip website for working journalists, both professional ones, like Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, and amateur ones, like myself) features another infuriating posting: a link to a story in the Chicago Tribune entitled “Papers not a must read: A generation of young adults turns to the Internet as its primary news source”.
Well, guess what, Mr. Mike Hughlett? (He’s the author of the piece.) I’m tired of having lesser-minded twits like one student you quoted, Heather Tody, whose “favorites are CNN.com, Weather.com and Oprah Winfrey’s home page” represent my tastes and reading pleasures! Or Josh Darrah, whose information-gathering consists of “sites devoted to comics that are exclusive to the Web.”
Mr. Hughlett, why don’t you bother digging deeper in your investigative research? For instance, you could have asked me about my reading habits. Though I’m only 16 years old, and not part of the collegiate demographic you cite in your article, I still think I count as part of the generation about which you were trying so hard to make broad, sweeping generalizations. The Generalization Generation? That’s you, Mr. Hughlett!
Each and every morning as I make my way to the dining halls here at Exeter, other students may be clutching their copies of Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare, or Algebra II by Houghton-Mifflin, in preparation for homeroom discussions or pop quizzes…but I always make sure to stop in the school’s library and check out the headlines on the print edition of the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Why? Because you know that when something is printed on paper, it has endurance going for it, and more importantly, legacy, unlike the online editions of newspapers’ websites, or the blogs kept by some of my classmates. Yes, Google has already cached the unpleasant things that Jeremy Forrester and Alfred Liu and Jesse Quinlan said about my behavior at lunchtime last Tuesday, when I slipped on a wet spot on the floor near where the trays are stored, but that doesn’t mean Google was able to cache the cellphone photos they took of this unfortunate incident after I complained to Vice Principal Hartley and they had to take their entries down.
See what I mean? If this news had been reported in the print edition of the New York Times, it would have lived on forever, searing the truth into the public’s conscience for all eternity. Much like the paper’s reports about Superdome rapes, Wen Ho Lee, and Ahmad Chalabi, people many years from now might have picked up hard copy portrayals of my embarrassing tumble and laughed at my misfortune…and known the truth of that shameful day.
Ultimately, how we read is important. It’s a matter of the comfort and security that holding a hard copy of a broadsheet newspaper provides its readers, whether they’re scanning the familiar page layout for relevant headlines, or using the massive width of the sheet of unfolded paper to shield their eyes from their classmates’ scowls and laughter. I only wish the paper stock were thicker and stronger, to better withstand the writing utensils and pen caps thrown my way.
But I’m still sticking with print, Mr. Hughlett.
(REPRINTED ONLINE WITH KIND PERMISSION OF MR. CLARK TURNER, SCHOOL PAPER ADVISOR)
After a long day of nervous waiting — complete with capricious salivating and nail-biting — by political pundits, the media and bloggers far and wide, “Plamegate” Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, we have just learned, has returned from the federal courthouse with four, count ’em, four indictments in tow. And, suffice it to say, this goes straight to the very top of the U.S. government…
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White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley
A real wild card, the inclusion of Hadley in the mix…While he worked alongside Condoleezza Rice during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as well as during the White House’s planning stages in 2001 and 2002, few longtime observers of the Fitzgerald investigation had ever really pegged Hadley as having much to do with the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name to media sources. Though, according to documents, Hadley apparently played a heretofore unknown role in the subsequent cover-up, and has now been indicted for perjury. |
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Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby
Libby, of course, had long been speculated to be one of the primary targets of the Fitzgerald investigation, so his indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice pertaining to the cover-up of the Wilson matter will come as no surprise to those who knew all along the degree to which he sought to protect his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, from being tainted by the grand jury’s inquest. And, it seems, in sacrificing himself, he succeeded in saving his boss’ hide, as Cheney seems to have safely skirted through the investigation unharmed. |
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Deputy chief of staff and top presidential political adviser Karl Rove
“Bush’s Brain”, as he’s been called time and again, was, alongside Libby, long determined to be one of the major architects of the White House smear campaign against Ambassador Joseph Wilson. So his indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice also comes as no surprise. Whether or not he will resign later today, and the damage such an action will do to Bush’s presidency, remains to be seen. |
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White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford
Finally, the big gun…an indictment for criminal conspiracy in the effort to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative. Though Comerford was only recently hired by First Lady Laura Bush this past August — a mere two months ago — anonymous sources within the President’s staff have reported that the first female to ever serve as the White House’s executive chef had been a longtime problem for the administration. Starting with her efforts to discredit Joseph Wilson for making disparaging comments about the administration’s making a deceptively inaccurate link between Iraqi heads of state and the acquisition of Nigerian uranium, sources say that Comerford’s name has been revealed on transcripts from journalists Matthew Cooper and Walter Pincus as the primary source of the now infamous leak of Wilson’s wife’s identity. These sources also add that scribbled within Pincus’ notebook were numerous references to “yellow cake” and “flame”, which had erroneously been thought to reference Comerford’s pastry recipes and sautee methodology. When asked for comment by reporters covering the case moments ago, Comerford was weeping and defiant as she made her way through the White House’s front gate, stammering, “I don’t know what’s going on…I don’t know what I did wrong! I did nothing wrong!” Sources had no comment on her strongly-worded denials. |
“Republicans Ask Oil Industry for Help With Fuel Prices”, the New York Times, October 26, 2005
“Major Oil Company Profits Expected To Be $96B, Up From $68B Last Year…”, the Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2005 (by way of the Huffington Post)
“Iraq war has taken a toll of 2,000 — Latest death reflects a trend: Insurgency now flares up in areas U.S. thought safe”, the Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2005
“Bush: Iraq war will require more sacrifice”, Reuters, October 25, 2005:
As the U.S. military death toll in Iraq reached 2,000, President George W. Bush said on Tuesday the war will require more time and sacrifice, and rejected calls for a U.S. pullout.
“Each loss of life is heartbreaking, and the best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and lay the foundation of peace by spreading freedom,” Bush said, his voice breaking with emotion as he spoke at a luncheon of military wives at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington.
That emotion that broke his voice? Fear…and the realization that four years of hypocrisy and deception regarding Iraq may very well be taking its toll on his beloved legacy.
Poor sap.
NOT IN ANY WAY RELATED: Mr. 3000
Yes, it’s that most wonderful time of the year, when Christmas yet again comes under siege from the shadowy forces of secular evil. It is fair to say that most American children today don’t even know who Christmas is. But who can we blame? Two new books dare to finger the partisan Grinches responsible for stealing Christmas. A tale of the tape.
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| Title | |
| How the Republicans Stole Christmas | The War on Christmas |
| Wordy Subtitle | |
| The Republican Party’s Declared Monopoly on Religion and What Democrats Can Do to Take it Back | How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Thought |
| Ethnicity-Free Author Name | |
| Bill Press | John Gibson |
| White-Bred’s Qualifications | |
| Bill Press is a political commentator for MSNBC. Prior to joining MSNBC, he was cohost of CNN’s Crossfire and The Spin Room with Tucker Carlson. | John Gibson is the host of The Big Story on Fox News Channel, which airs daily at 5:00 p.m. and is currently the sixth highest rated show in all of cable news. |
| Attractive? | |
If you go for that kind of thing. |
Hell yeah. |
| Christmas Tree on Cover? | |
| Yes | Yes |
| American Flag on Cover? | |
| Yes | No |
| Ostensible Grinch | |
| Republicans | Liberal activists and “media people” |
| Real Grinch | |
| Evangelical Christian cabal | Jewish cabal |
| Sample Five-Star Amazon Review | |
| I read this book in the aftermath of Katrina–ironically when Christian groups are now silent about morality. The federal, state, and local governments (packed with ‘their’ people) are accused of neglecting predominantly poor African American people who could not just jump into their cars and evacuate. Meanwhile, FEMA came under public scrutiny because then-director Michael Brown delayed sending in aid. | 80% of our country is Christian and many of our national slogans etc. have the word God in them. How did it ever come to this, that the minority is calling the shots. NO ONE is taking away Christmas for me. Oh yeah, maybe they want us to celebrate Kwanza instead. This is an eye opening book. |