May 2007 Archives

On May 19th, in Lynchburg, Virginia, Jerry Falwell was laid to rest. At his funeral, former Speaker of the House, sometime adulterer, and putative 2008 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich took a few minutes to give a eulogy for Falwell, discussing among other things the state of the relationship between religion and politics in America.

I had no idea things had gotten this bad. Said Gingrich:

[B]asic fairness demands that religious believers deserve a chance to be heard. This is a democracy. We are supposed to invite all persons and all parties to the public debate. It is wrong to single out those who believe in God for discrimination. Yet today it is impossible to miss the discrimination against religious believers.

I'm ashamed to admit it, Mr. Gingrich, but I'm afraid it is possible to miss it-- because I have missed it. But I must agree that it's wrong--and moreover, it sounds alarming in the extreme.

Please let me know: what's happened?

*Have atheists increased their Congressional majority? Do they now hold both houses?

*Have Christian candidates have been forced to hide their religious affiliation on the stump for fear of losing the secularist vote? Have any of these men and women dared admit to a belief in God?

*Have incumbents been forced to sneak through back alleys into Washington churches and synogogues for fear of being outed as theists?

*Did Brit Hume vet the GOP candidates for suspected religious sympathies before the recent presidential debate, informing Mitt Romney that Mormonism might not be a very old religion, but it was still a religion, and that he'd have to renounce it if he wanted his microphone turned on?

*Has the National Cathedral been broken down, its stone arches reduced to paving stones for the pavilion of the new Madeleine Murray O'Hare Monument on the Mall?

*Are our public airwaves so hostile to religious broadcasts that sermons and services can only be picked up when they're sent out by pirate stations based on offshore drilling rigs?

*Are public schools and government offices forced to open on Christmas AND Easter?

*Are coins and notes bearing the motto "In God We Trust" no longer legal tender for all debts, public and private?

*Are science teachers now in command of Sunday schools across the nation, indoctrinating innocent little Biblical literalists with their radical beliefs in evolution, an old universe, or a secular value for pi (a sinful 3.1415926535, as opposed to the Biblically mandated 3.0)?

*Did Virginia governor Tim Kaine send the National Guard to bar Christian students from entering church in Blacksburg following the recent shootings at Virginia Tech?

*Are impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush under way, now that he has revealed the fact that his favorite philosopher is Jesus?

*Is James Dobson now living in exile, a broken man, speaking on third-world street corners to a handful of indifferent heathens, while his former ministry's wealth and political power has been commandeered by the Agnostic Jihad?

*And when a religious figure (such as a protestant minister or founder of a church school) passes on, are his funeral rites considered so odious and horrifying to the public sensibility that no major news organizations send reporters to cover the ceremony, and no presidential hopeful dares to make an appearance there?

And here I always thought America was a nation founded on religious liberty and uncommonly accepting of religious belief. What kind of nation are we living in?

8:44 PM

When you've done anything long enough, you start quantifying it. I'm not sure if thinking about how long you've done it has any effect on the way you're doing it, but I've certainly noticed a tendency to compare durations. On July 12, for example, my marriage will be old enough to drink legally in the United States. As of June 1st, I will have spent as many school years at Woodberry as I did attending school myself. And frighteningly, we're finishing our eighth year in our current house, which is the longest period I have ever spent living in a single dwelling.

(Honest, I worked it out:
1963-64 Baez Street, Raleigh, NC
1964-70 Tinkerbell Road, Chapel Hill, NC
1970-76 Sugarberry Road, Chapel Hill, NC
1976-81 Smith Avenue, Chapel Hill, NC*
1981-83 Old West Dormitory, U. of North Carolina
1983-84 Grosvenor Place, Manchester University
1984-85 Old Well Apartments, Chapel Hill, NC
1985-86 Todd Street, Carrboro, NC
1986-87 Cedar Terrace, Chatham Co., NC
1987-91 Wyrick Street, Chapel Hill, NC
1991-95 Hayden Lane, Fayetteville, NC
1995-99 Grelen Farm, Orange Co., VA
1999-present Woodberry Forest School, Madison Co., VA

*Technically this was my legal address while I lived on dorm and in Manchester, but I spent few nights in my parents' house during those three years.)

But the eight-year anniversary of my moving into my current house pales before my realization that one of my favorite TV shows is about to become so old that it has to register for the draft. Yes, in December of 2007, The Simpsons will reach the ripe old age of 18.

Granted, I haven't watched it regularly in years--that lack of reception prevents me from doing much of anything regularly where TV is concerned. Still, there's no question that the episodes I did watch (or which I've taped and watched repeatedly) hold up as some of the best that television has to offer. (Yes, I know that makes me sound like Jack Perkins, or at least like MST3K's Mike Nelson's parody of Jack Perkins.) The basic set-up of the show is no more promising than that of dozens of other shows: the dim and usually pudgy slob of a husband with an improbably slim and endlessly patient wife. It's been a staple of television since The Honeymooners, and there have been iterations of it in everything from The Flintstones to All in the Family to Home Improvement to The King of Queens.

What makes The Simpsons work is a combination of razor-sharp writing, a terrific cast, and the cartoon form itself. The latter is important for two reasons: first, it allows the writers to put in literally ANYTHING they dream up, whether it's alien invasions, a thousand monkeys banging on typewriters, or the Ayn Rand Day Care Center. It's as easy to animate those three things as it is to animate Bart skateboarding to school. Second, the cartoon form allows us to distance ourselves from the characters somewhat, which makes it easier to laugh at them. A real man who acted like Homer would just be pitiful, and a real-life Krusty the Clown would downright horrifying, but because they exist only as bug-eyed caricatures, we can cackle at them without feeling remotely guilty.

The voice actors are also superb. The distaff members of the cast (Julie Kavner as Marge and her sisters, Nancy Cartwright as Bart, and Yeardley Smith as Lisa) do comparatively few voices, but give the handful of characters they do play a certain emotional depth. The male members, by contrast, go for versatility Dan Castallanetta voices not only Homer and Krusty, but also Barney, Groundskeeper Willy, Grandpa, and even Sideshow Mel. Hank Azaria manages everyone from Chief Wiggum to Apu to Moe to Professor Frink to Comic Book Guy to Bumblebee Man, making even the most obvious stereotypes hilariously rich. The most remarkable member, to my thinking, may be Harry Shearer, who not only has to play both halves of the comedically delicious boss/toady relationship between Mr. Burns and Smithers, but also cracks me up as Principal Skinner, Reverend Lovejoy, Kent Brockman, and Ned Flanders.

But as with so many other forms of entertainment, it all comes down to the writing. I know of no twenty-two-minute sequence of American television that comes close to duplicating the sheer inventiveness of "A Streetcar Named Marge." Not only are we treated to the aforementioned Ayn Rand Day Care Center, but the show veers from a parody of the Miss America pageant (with the contestants all belting Janis Ian's outsider anthem "At Seventeen") to a daycare-center reworking of The Great Escape (complete with theme music) to a takeoff of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (with animated Hitchcock cameo) to a musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire featuring a bare-chested Ned Flanders (as Stanley Kowalski) bellowing:

STELLAAAAAA!
STELLAAAAAA!
Can't you hear me yell-a?
You're puttin' me through Hell-a!
STELLAAAAAA!

But the throwaway lines, in many ways, are what make the show stick in my memory. Just off the top of my head:

Lisa (deranged by the water at Duff Gardens): "I AM the Lizard QUEEN!"
Burns: "Damn it, Smithers, this isn't rocket science, it's brain surgery!"
Marge: "You were right, outside interests are stupid."
Bart (reading video game box): "The game where condemned criminals disembowel each other with rusty hooks."
Apu: "I thought I was some sort of hummingbird."
Grandpa: "I'm cold, and there are wolves after me."
Barney: "Sure thing, giant beer!"
Selma: "We've got soy milk, Clamato, and Mr. Pibb."
Smithers: "I think women and seamen don't mix, sir."
Skinner: "And now, we present, on saxophone, Lisa Simpson, on triangle, Martin Prince, and with a flute up his nose, Ralph Wiggum."
Kang: "Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Krusty: "Angry. Angry young man."
Festival Stage Manager: "Somebody ordered the London Symphony Orchestra... possibly while stoned... Cypress Hill, I'm looking in your direction..."
Flanders: "Godspeed, little doodle!"
Homer: "BART! YOU WANNA SEE MY NEW CHAINSAW AND HOCKEY MASK?!"
Groundskeeper Willie: "Och, I'm really bad at this!"
Maggie: "This is indeed a disturbing universe."

All in all, if it takes eighteen years to produce all that, I'm prepared to wait eighteen years. If The Simpsons makes it to twenty-one, maybe my marriage can take it out for a beer.

9:26 PM

"WXYC."

"Hey, hon."

"Hey, Kel. What's up?"

"I want you to play a song for me."

"Okay. What?"

"I'm not sure. I think it's new. I don't know the title, but I'm pretty sure it's a girl's name, and I think it's about the singer's imaginary Vietnamese girlfriend."

"...Uh, okay. Who's it by?"

"I don't know."

And with that, Kelly had sent me on a quest that would put me and my family in Charlottesville last night watching a scraggly-bearded guy spinning turntables onstage without ever actually acknowledging that he was the opening act for the evening's headliner.

In my days at the microphone for WXYC, I spent a lot of time trying to decipher cryptic clues about requests, and Kelly's clues on that evening in 1989 were pretty darned cryptic. Nonetheless, I felt fairly sure that they were specific enough to give me a decent chance of properly identifying the song if only I could find it. I therefore took the first clue--"new"--as the most useful starting point: if it was new, it might well be on an album in the New Releases bin, from which every disc jockey had to play five cuts per hour: three from the Heavy Rotation bin, one from the Medium Rotation bin, and one from the Light Rotation bin. (The Medium bin had fewer albums than the Light, so each album got more airplay.) I pulled out a handful of Heavy albums and began scanning the covers for girls' names--preferably something that sounded Vietnamese.

It didn't take long to turn up a likely candidate: side one, track one, of a big blue album that didn't have a title or band name on the front. All it had was a bizarre-looking structure that looked like a model of a church, or maybe a puppet theater. It had a long orange extension cord sticking out of it, though, so maybe it was a pump organ or something:



The back, though, revealed several things. Most important was the title of Side One, Track One: "Ana Ng." I had a likely candidate for Kelly's mystery song in my hand. I also saw that the back of the album had two large blocks of text. One read "LINCOLN." I assumed that "Lincoln" was the artist and that the other block of text was the album title. I later learned that I was completely bass-ackward about that.

Plopping the record on the turntable, I quickly cued up the song, noting as I did so only that the first sound was a loud power chord. When it was finally time to hit "play," however, I heard that the chord was repeated, creating a pulsing, thumping effect that led into one of the most instantly appealing pop songs I'd ever heard.

This was Kelly's and my introduction to They Might Be Giants.

Since that first brash opening, we've gone whole-hog into TMBG fandom, buying nearly everything they've ever released (barring collections) since their 1986 debut. (I think we'd missed that when it first came out because we were, y'know, getting married and stuff.) In the last 18 years, we've seen them in concert together and apart, both in their earliest two-guys-and-a-backing-tape incarnation (at the old Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill) and their more recent five-piece band. My two most recent shows were both in Charlottesville at Starr Hill Music Hall. Kel and I took in a show on September 24th, 2004, which featured a wonderful version of the metallic, dirgelike "Older":

"You're older than you've ever been,
And now you're even older,
And now you're older still."

And then at midnight, when it actually became Kelly's 40th birthday, they were playing "She's an Angel." Perfect.

Last night's show was simultaneously a novelty and a nostalgia trip. I can now say without doubt that the five-piece version of the group is by far the more interesting to see in concert, partly because of the guitar virtuosity of Dan Miller and partly because the lack of a backing tape gives Johns Linnell and Flansburgh the chance to improvise (the former usually with music and lyrics, the latter with stage patter.) Also, they actually rock. The sheer punk-o-matic energy let loose during "Till My Head Falls Off" or "Why Does the Sun Shine?" would probably shock some of the snarkier WXYC jocks who used to sniff that TMBG was too "precious."

They didn't perform "Ana Ng," alas--in fact, they omitted Lincoln from the set list entirely--but we were treated to some cool new stuff off the upcoming album The Else, as well as some welcome favorites: "Birdhouse in Your Soul," "Don't Let's Start," "Turn Around," "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," "Meet James Ensor," and my favorite live treat, the in-sequence performance of "Fingertips," a collection of unrelated song snippets that was originally intended to offer novelty whenever listeners hit the "RANDOM" button on their CD players. I'd seen them play it before, but if anything, it was more fun last night than ever.

Why? Well, the nostaglia element of the show should be obvious: Kelly and I have been fans for nearly twenty years, we know these songs, we've seen the band live a number of times... they're a part of our lives. But the novelty element? That would be due to the presence of Thing One and Thing Two. Yes, we took them to their first club show: last night's performance was open to teens as well. They didn't stand near us--they're teenagers, after all--but we let them have their brains battered by loud rock music and their nostrils assaulted by the scent of spilled beer for an hour and a half. On a school night. I don't know if that makes us great parents, but for a band that has connected Kelly and me since before we had children, I felt as though the experience was worth it. And if one of the boys suddenly takes up the accordion, well, now perhaps you'll know why.

8:48 PM

I'm as baffled by today's GOP as the next guy, I'll admit--maybe even more baffled. I've certainly voted for far more Democrats (and probably more independents) than Republicans since I first went to the polls in 1982, but never have I considered the Republican Party a haven for the delusional--not until the last few years, anyway.

Nixon was a crook, and a bigoted, paranoid crook at that, but the reason why he was so secretive was that he had a fundamental understanding that what he was doing ought to stay hidden. If he didn't exactly have a sense of shame, he at least had a pragmatic understanding that shameful things, if exposed, could make his life difficult. As Harry Frankfurt makes abundantly clear in his terse, brilliant book On Bullshit, a liar does at least acknowledge the power of the truth, which is why he labors to conceal it. A bullshitter by contrast, doesn't particularly care that what he's saying is untrue; he rarely bothers to make up a plausible excuse because he doesn't believe the truth has any power to stop him. Nixon was a liar par excellence, which made his administration criminal in many arenas, but he either lied (about Watergate or the "secret" Cambodian bombings, say) or acknowledged reality (by opening relations with the Soviets and the Chinese, say).

What we're seeing today, then, is government by bullshit.

It's now obvious, four years after the fact, that no Mission was Accomplished when Bush the Lesser landed on a carrier off San Diego to proclaim that it was. The proclamation has been buried in increasingly larger and more malodorous piles of excrement since 2003, and I can only hope that the thousands who have died since that day haunt the C-in-C's nightmares for the rest of his life.

It's also obvious that the Department of Justice is run by a crony of the president whose legal qualifications do not qualify him for the post of Attorney General, and that his claim before Congress that he can't remember why he fired certain attorneys is a patent attempt to escape responsibility--for an action which is, in itself, entirely legal.

Bullshit has been piled on high in every corner of the current Republican party. Education? Despite studies proving it doesn't work, "abstinence-only" sex education continues to be forced on thousands of children. Ethics? Charges of bribery, obstruction of justice, lying under oath, and soliciting prostitution are being brought against White House officials, Congressmen, and cabinet members. Elections? Claims of mishandled voter fraud investigations are at the center of the U.S. attorney scandal, yet fewer than 100 instances of such fraud have been uncovered over the past five years.

As for the 2008 election, the main GOP candidates carry burdens ranging from multiple divorces, extramarital affairs, beliefs that turn off the base (especially on abortion), beliefs that turn off the general electorate (especially on Iraq). (One even made the baffling claim that his favorite book is L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, a doorstop whose soundtrack album (featuring Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and a variety of other musically gifted Scientologists) showed that L. Ron might have been able to afford a Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument back in 1982 when they cost $15,000, but also that his talent for composing and performing music lagged well behind his talent for fabricating a tax-exempt business.)

But most baffling? There are still Republicans out there trying to justify the actions of their party. Some are, I'm sure, fine people who simply can't come to grips with the depths to which the current GOP has sunk, but there seem to be many others who simply don't care that they're being handed bullshit. So long as they hear what they want to hear, they're willing to deny reality and keep supporting Bush.

Why?

As near as I can tell, it's because he's a lot of things, but at least he's not a Democrat.

Of course, as their grip on reality gets looser, some rather alarming statements are being made. Thomas Sowell, for example, makes this extraordinary comment at the National Review's online site:

"When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup."

And if that makes you wonder about the Right's understanding of how democracy works... like I said, I'm baffled, too.

7:41 PM