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Propaganda

I was watching Conan O’Brien a couple of nights ago.  Now, I know that for those of you in the U.S., his show has been off the air for a while now, but I live in Europe and this was a rerun from last November.

I don’t really understand that.  We live in a world of instant communication so there is no technical barrier whatsoever to showing American TV programs in real time in Europe.  I could understand a delay of a few hours, since I don’t really feel like watching Conan at 10 o’clock in the morning.

Same with films.  Sometimes they are issued simultaneously and sometimes we have to wait 6 months or so.  I don’t understand the logic of it at all.

But that’s not the point of this post.  One of Conan’s guests was a marine recently returned from Iraq.  Which disturbs me on an entertainment program.  This isn’t the news.  This isn’t a documentary.

Then, when he comes on, everyone applauds politely.  Because of course we support the troops.  Of course, that doesn’t have to mean we support the war.  But it does.

Anyway, the pretext for having him there was that there was a story about how he had adopted a dog while in Iraq.  Nice.  I like dogs.  However, I like people more.  Being nice to dogs does not, in my opinion, make up for killing people.

Anyway, the dog at some point had had his ears cut off.  We don’t know why.  Maybe someone had just cropped his ears as a fashion statement, the way we do with boxers.  Maybe he’d had a flea or tick infestation.  Maybe his ears had been used in a soup.  We don’t know.

The part of the interview that bothered me most was when the marine talked about his conversation with the man who had cut the dog’s ears off.  Now, the fact that he was talking to American soldiers at all indicates that he was not the enemy.  Of course, you never know, but chances are good that he was on our side.

The marine said (on Conan) that when the man told him he had cut off the dogs ears, he (wearing a military uniform and showing a very large knife) had said “How would you like it if I cut your ears off.”  The crowd loved it.  Very Jack Bauer, Dirty Harryish.

But it was the wrong question.  It was a question that absolutely guaranteed an unuseful response.  It was a bully’s question.

The right question to ask would have been “Why?”

Sarah’s Big Speech

Well, the big event has come and gone and given us, as we suspected, plenty of laughs.  There are 3 things I would particularly like to ridicule.

First, her criticism of Barack Obama for using a teleprompter.  This joke is as pointless as a balloon and as stale as old arugula.  Everybody uses a teleprompter.  The weatherman and the sportscasters, as Sarah should well know, use teleprompters.  Singers at karaoke bars use a teleprompter, or something very like it.  Politicians and public speakers of all sorts use teleprompters, and have been, I’m guessing, for the last 50 years, at least.  It’s not really high tech.

Before teleprompters, they would have used notes.  On paper.

So, how did Sarah Palin deliver her speech?  There is a photo out there (see Huffpo) of our very own Bible Spice with notes written on her hand.  Her criticism of teleprompters, it would seem, is just that they are elitist, and real Americans write on their hand.

My favorite line in the reporting on the speech, though, was the bit at the beginning, where they said “a crowd of less than 1,000.”

The Joy of Cooking

Since I’ve been staying home and being Mr. Mom, I’ve had to do a bit more of the cooking.  Cooking, to me, is like singing or dancing.

I love to sing, but I’m pretty much completely tone deaf.  Really, when people talk about the key of C or the key of G, I have no idea what they are talking about.  It’s like trying to explain color to a blind man.  Nonetheless, I sing to myself as I walk down the street, I sing in the shower, and I love karaoke with a passion.

I’ve got a fairly deep voice, I love being on stage and I can get really, really loud when I want to.

I love to dance, but I step on people’s feet a lot and have been known, on occasion, to fall over.  Doesn’t matter.  If there’s a chance to get on the dance floor, I’m there.

Likewise with cooking.  I’m not a great cook.  I ignore recipes or make substitutions and adjustments according to taste quite liberally.  I sometimes forget what I’m doing and leave out key ingredients, or get too stoned and let things burn.  Nonetheless, I enjoy it, I do my best and the result is almost always edible and occasionally, on a lucky day, excellent.

The problem is, my family and I don’t like the same things.  I like spicy food.  My wife, being Czech, does not.  If you sprinkle a little bit of pepper on top, that counts as spicy here.  Even the Chinese and Thai restaurants serve food significantly less spicy than they would anywhere else in the world.  My kids aren’t mad about spicy food either, but they are young.  There is hope.

Also, I love mushrooms and I’m the only one in the family who does.  That is a shame, because this is a wonderful country for mushrooms.  In America, you usually get just one variety in the stores, the kind known here as champignons.  Here, you usually have a choice of two or three.  As a child in Iowa, we often went out hunting mushrooms, but we were looking specifically for morels.  Here, when people go out hunting mushrooms, there are numerous varieties that they will pick.

So, I concentrate on the things that everybody likes and try to limit my experimentation, but not too much.  After all, you never know when I will create a masterpiece.

Edison and Ford

I just took a walk through Blog Park, and any who read my very first entry will know what that means.

For me, it is the place which is closest to the interface between this world, that is the physical location in space and time where we find ourselves, with the trams passing by on the street and the dirty snow bordering sidewalks with patches of ice, and the world which exists outside us all and inside my own mind, the noosphere is the actual word for it, the world of ideas, that accumulation of art and literature and science which has been excreted from the body of humanity over  the thousands of generations of our existence.

In short, it’s where I go to get high and let my mind wander.

Today, for some reason, I started thinking about Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and the relationship of an individual human being to immortality.  I hope my poems are read 100 or 1,000 years from now, just as people still switch on Edison’s electric lights and undoubtedly still will, or something even more amazing, and if people are no longer driving cars in 1,000 years, as I fervently hope, Ford’s innovations in manufacturing and labor relations have shaped our society in many ways.

But they each had a dark side.  Edison was a ruthless businessman and a thief of ideas.  Ford was a Nazi.  Not actually convicted, but definitely sympathetic to their cause way beyond an acceptable historical cutoff point.  (which makes him no worse than Joseph Kennedy, Sr. or Prescott Bush, but I digress)

Part of the accolades which history has assigned to Edison rightfully belong to Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse and Joseph Swan.

Does it matter?  Everyone involved is now well beyond dead, so unless there is some kind of actual afterlife (which I can’t accept on anywhere near as literal a level as most in our society) it doesn’t matter to them, who gets the credit.

Still, I wrote a little movie in my head, with Edison and Ford (who were close friends) as bad guys, and a host of minor characters, all interesting in their own right, battling against them in short vignettes, in the style of Love, Actually.

And that’s what I was thinking as I walked through the park today.

Republican Humor

Republicans believe that if they repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  Sadly enough, that has worked for them.

The party of family values has been caught cheating, seducing children, picking up men in public toilets, doing drugs, patronizing prostitutes and even having sex with animals (the unfortunately named Neal Horsley, of Georgia, who admitted to sex with a mule).  Still, they call themselves the party of family values, and many of their devoted followers believe it.

They claimed, over and over and over again, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass  destruction, and he didn’t.  They were not mistaken.  They just lied.  And they got away with it.

They invented the war on terror which, it turns out, is really just a war on Iraq and Afghanistan.  Terror is a crime.  A police matter.  Its rhetorical escalation to a war has cost hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of innocent lives.  People whose only crime was being born in the wrong country.

The other day, the topic of Republican humor came up, when Senator Rick Santorum whose name has become synonymous with a rather gross afterproduct of anal sex, sent a twitter message with a joke about Arugula.

Arugula, for any who don’t know, is a kind of lettuce.  It is popular among those who like salads, but enjoy a bit of variety now and then.  Obama got in trouble (with Republicans) when he talked about it.  They seemed to think that that, and a taste for Dijon mustard (which I quite like, btw) marked him as an elitist.

The same way they joked constantly about John Kerry windsurfing.  It has worked for them before, so they thought it might work again.

But Obama got elected, so they switched to watermelon and fried chicken jokes.  First rule of humor (OK, not the first) is you can’t have it both ways.

And teleprompter jokes, which I suppose means he’s not intelligent.  First rule of humor (and this is probably a lot closer to the top of the list) is it has to be true.  President Barack H. Obama is about as far from unintelligent as you can get.  He is a brilliant writer, a professor of constitutional law, and an amazing public speaker.  All of those require a fair bit of smarts.  To paraphrase something he said recently, you can question his policies without questioning his intelligence.

But Republican humor is like all Republican thought.  If a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth, they seem to think, then a joke repeated often enough becomes funny.

Note to Republicans:  No, it doesn’t.