Hey, Amazon Just Delivered My Copy of "The American Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of Political Words and Phrases."

I looked up "irony":

"Obama Angrily Denounces Gun-Rights Groups as Willful Liars."

Annette: Two Degrees of Separation, and Two Great Ladies Take a Certain Style With Them

Many years ago, especially MANY years before the Memsahib Era, when I had more hair and less of the rest of me, I was at P.J. Clarke’s in Chicago with my chum Doug, when a woman approached me.   Her name, as I recall, was Jackie.  Despite the dim light, I could see that she was well within tolerances – she had a scruffy Princess Di look about her, kind of a sexy little piece of brass.

I believe the word for what she did to me was “accosted,” and she said: “I’ll bet you wouldn't accept if I called and asked you to lunch.” (That's how you know how many years and pounds ago this was.)   She did, and I did.

I don’t remember much about the lunch, except that to her, Annette Funicello was “Aunt Annette.” Her uncle, Jack Gilardi, was Annette’s first husband, with whom she had three children. 

So Jackie, wherever you are, my condolences.

*     *     *

 Annette, Annette.  You didn’t rescue England or shame the Soviet Union like Margaret Thatcher, whose day of death you shared, but you moved a lot of movie tickets and a lot of adolescent trousers.  More than Baroness Thatcher, anyway.  (Although how could anyone fantasize about Annette?) 

As I considered the interesting coincidence of the simultaneous passing of two such different ladies, I was struck by one element of their individual styles that they shared.  One doesn't see women much choose it these days.  But I loved the look and still do.

Annette Funicello, Margaret Thatcher, RIP.  

We all pass, and the permanent is impermanent. 

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You Cannot Trust Ladybugs

So I’m at Callahan’s yesterday buying some flowers for some pots I keep in our backyard.  At the checkout stand my attention is drawn to some movement off to one side.  It was a display of translucent sleeves of live ladybugs, 1500 per sleeve, it said, scrabbling uncomfortably over one another.   There was a sponge in there to keep things  moist, and because the market for sleeves of hundreds of dead ladybugs is negligible.   

The card said that they were buddies of the backyard, voracious consumers of aphids and fungus because they reproduced prodigiously – not such ladies after all! -- and would keep the landscaping blight-free all season long.   

Now I had never seen any aphids or fungus in our lushly landscaped postage-stamp backyard, but ‘phids – well, you know how they are.  And fungi!  You never know when their population might explode – their morals are also notoriously suspect – and attack the house.  

I was seized with the passion to liberate these little pals of innocent greenery and I bought two sleeves.  (By the way, ladybugs are not true bugs; they are beetles, and your entomologist would prefer that you refer to them as “ladybird beetles.”)  

I followed the directions with care, refrigerating them for an hour before release into the cool of the early evening onto pre-moistened plants, so they would have something to drink after escaping from that rancid little sponge.  I slit opened the sleeves and placed them on a couple of bushes.  They escaped with alacrity and began exploring the bushes.  Some took to the air as I spent some time removing a few of the more adventuresome ones from my person.  (I really need to throw out that “Eau de Maggot” aftershave.)  

I went inside and over the next two hours discovered a few that had hitched a ride in the folds of my ladybug-releasing outfit (loose fitting camo and a “BigButt Cigar” promotional cap I was gifted at a local smoke shop where I used to trade).   

Huh.  “48 Hours” fans, I guess.  

I went out this morning expecting to encounter a riotous banquet of Coccinellidae  munching merrily on landscape pests.  In my tour of the backyard, I saw precisely one ladybug.  

Ingrates.

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Speedfinger Gods, RIP

We lost two musicians of very different stripes within the last two weeks.  Both were known for their astounding technique.

The first, you have heard about.  Van Cliburn single-handedly -- perhaps two-handedly -- reawakened classical music in the United States with his stunning performances of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 at the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in 1958.  In Moscow – at the height of the Cold War – he received an eight-minute standing ovation. 

This put the Russian judges in a terrible quandary.  Could they award the first prize in this inaugural quadrennial competition to an American?  The call went out, all the way to Nikita Khrushchev.   Khrushchev was the Great Satan of my childhood, but the years since have been somewhat kinder to him as we have tasted the brutality of his successors and learned the crimes of his predecessor Stalin, a murderer of civilians of Hitlerian proportions.   And when the judges’ tremulous inquiry reached him, Khrushchev is reported to have asked:  “Is he the best?” When told that he was, Khrushchev answered:  “Then give him the prize!”  And they did.

In 1962, I was ten years old and had little awareness of Van Cliburn other than thinking that it may have been the coolest name ever.  Then one day my sainted Aunt Geneva came to visit.  A lovely woman, and the kindest soul ever, who loved her niece Susan and nephew Steve.  She was a piano teacher in Wichita at the time, and worked for a company called Underground Vaults and Storage, which sold storage space in the abandoned Carey salt mines in Kansas.  Those deep caverns were dry, tornado-proof, and perfect for preserving stuff like the original prints of the movie “Gone With the Wind” and many other important things, but none more important to Aunt Geneva than the childhood scribblings of Sue and me.  The storage space was said to be able withstand a nuclear blast, an important consideration in those more jittery times.   I have since wondered if archaeologists who survived Armageddon would ever encounter Aunt Geneva’s treasures down there and wonder whether Steve Lawson’s first grade poem “The Sun” was an exemplar of pre-apocalyptic literature.

During her visit, she gave me a program from a concert she had recently attended in Wichita:

She opened it to an inside page, and there was Van Cliburn's autograph.  I didn't have any autographs of anyone; I don't know what my reaction was, but I hope for Aunt Geneva's tender sake I at least feigned excitement.  I saved it, of course, and on the occasion of Cliburn's death I hit the Steve attic archives to track it down.  As an Internet search revealed, Van Cliburn was very generous with autographs, and they may be had on eBay fairly cheaply. 

But I wonder how many people have Van Cliburn’s and his mother’s autograph on the same page?

The autographs appear to be in pencil – apparently a rather hard graphite, since they are faint.  Cliburn’s signature is the vertical one on the right-hand page.  Also appearing is the signature of the conductor, James P. Robertson, and, at the top right:  “With best of wishes, Rildia Bee Cliburn.”  Cliburn lived with her, his first piano teacher (she was trained by a student of Franz Liszt and was very accomplished in her own right) in Fort Worth until she died in 1994 at 97.

In this way I came to know better who Van Cliburn was.

The years passed.   Then one day when I was in high school, something possessed me to get interested in classical music.  What should I start with?  Well, sure, Van Cliburn.  I bought a cassette of his massive best-seller “My Favorite Chopin.”  I would play it over and over, along with “The Best of Peter Nero,”while tending the miniature golf shack at Bronco’s in Bellevue.  I was taking piano lessons at the time, and I could not understand how a human being’s fingers could move so quickly and so accurately across the keyboard and actually have to play the black keys sometimes while doing so.   That album also opened my eyes to Chopin, who sounded quite modern to me, and still does.  In later years, I learned the Polonaise in A Major, Op. 40, No. 1.  (Three sharps!  It was surely someone else playing that, and it should have been because I  played it badly.  I had better luck with the Prelude in E Minor, much more my speed.)

He retired from performing in 1978 at 44, but in 1994 he went on a 16-city tour with the Moscow Symphony, and I was fortunate to see him in San Diego.  He performed the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff concertos.  It was thrilling, but I thought his performance was just a bit off.  I heard some missed notes, not that I was intimately familiar with the scores, and in some passages he hit two notes intending to hit one.  But his charisma and charm flowed over the footlights and he could have been playing “Heart and Soul” for all anyone cared.

*     *     *

I never lost my interest in classical music, but like all males of college age, and as my tinnitus now attests, my attention turned to rock-and-roll.  Thanks to Yale roommate Alan Ringel, I received a fine education in that most invigorating of art forms, and I was especially drawn to the technicians of the guitar. 

In those days, before any of us had developed any real taste in music, the question was – who was fastest?   My first guitar-hero crush was Johnny Winter, the albino guitar slinger from Beaumont, Texas.  His beautiful and scorching solos on B.B. King’s “It’s My Own Fault” off of “Johnny Winter And – Live” blazed out of the JBL speakers every room seemed to have.  We would listen to it during our bridge sessions after dinner almost every night, and I can still whistle passages of his incredible fretwork from that song.

But no one was faster than Alvin Lee.

These days speedy guitar players are all over the place.  Many quickly learned the two-hand hammer-tap popularized by Edward Van Halen, and there are many amazing guitarists out there these days who spent their afternoons up in their bedrooms with their Stratocasters dreaming of the chicks they were going to get after they dazzled the crowd with their jaw-dropping fretwork.  (Edward himself married Valerie Bertinelli.)  

But Alvin Lee, the front man for Ten Years After who died last week at 68, did it all the old-fashioned way, firing away on his signature red hollow-body Gibson 335.  He and the band vaulted to stardom with their performance at Woodstock.   They sold a lot of records but their dedication to British blues, in turn based on good-old-red-blooded Chicago blues, instead of hummable pop, kept them from breaking through to the really big time.   The first time I heard “Spider in My Web” off of "Undead" I could not believe what I was hearing.  Here it is, a slow blues, it does go on a bit -- but about six minutes in, hold on to your chapeau:    "Spider in My Web" -- Ten Years After, Live

Now, as I learned over the years, velocity like Lee’s was not unknown to jazz fans.  Players like Larry Coryell and John McLaughlin were also incredibly fast players.  McLaughlin in particular stunned rock fans when he crossed over to space-rock-jazz-fusion with The Mahavishnu Orchestra (saw them in New York on a bill with my all-time guitar hero Jeff Beck), and I still love “The Inner Mounting Flame” and "Birds of Fire."

But there is something about those old blues-influenced players – Lee, Winter, Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Roy Buchanan, many others – that make those Gibsons and Fenders stand on their hind legs and bite.

But the only thing I was ever fast on was a typewriter.  A skill not of much interest to chicks.  

Van, Alvin – RIP.

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I Refuse to Concede that the Judgment in This Post Has Anything to Do With the Age of Its Author

No; its truth is universal.  Believe it.

I'm no big fan of Barbra Streisand, and not just because of her politics. But I will tell you this -- I would rather listen to her heartfelt, musical version of "The Way We Were" from this year's Oscars twenty times than to Jennifer Hudson's overwrought, insincere, look-at-me-how-'bout-them-pipes? version of "And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going" from the same broadcast ever again.  When she'd finally, finally concluded her whooping finish, I had to look away.  I was embarrassed at her lack of musicianship, and even more embarrassed that Hollywood royalty felt they had to stand up and cheer for that mess.  Surely there were some talents in that audience who knew the essential fraudulence of that performance.

I've had it with bellowing fake-emotion divas. They've got talent, but their taste and sincerity has been Whitney'd right out of them.

Knowing how to sing is one thing.  Today's divas know how to do that.  Their talent is undeniable.

They would be doing themselves, listeners, and music a big favor if they would concentrate on learning to sing songs.

And their yowling has infected American Idol and its imitators.  The Memsahib turned to it tonight, a show we used to watch, and after 47 seconds of a montage of the current crop of shrieking hopefuls, she switched the channel to something more musical, i.e., Bill O'Reilly.

You may not want Babs as Secretary of Health & Human Services, but the woman knows her way around a song. For all her immense gifts, Jennifer Hudson needs to calm down, put on a Julie London album, and have a sandwich or something.

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OVALTINE: The Rant

How did Ovaltine, makers of chocolate malty milk powder reputedly beloved of small children who repeatedly demand it, become so popular by selling a product THAT IS NOT SOLUBLE IN MILK? I put Ovaltine in the glass of milk, stir the thing frantically for MINUTES like the spoon is attached to a MerCruiser until I freakin' PRAY for carpal tunnel, and when I stop and remove the spoon I am presented with a surface of congealed islands of milk-resistant Ovaltine slowly swirling in the glass, and the sides of the glass looking like a windshield after an encounter with a flock of diseased sea gulls. 

 

Doesn't matter if I put the Ovaltine in first, or after I pour the milk. 

 

Doesn't even matter if I've warmed the milk. 

 

The thing invariably ends up looking like Willy Wonka's septic tank.  

 

I'm sure it's drinkable if you're a baleen whale straining that sludge out of the barely-flavored milk underneath, but otherwise it's like trying to drink something they found at Pompeii.

 

 

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If I Were a Clay Pigeon, I'd Head to Camp David -- Or, The Left-Handed Gun

I have a question of the sort that is usually answered somewhere on the Interwebs.  But I can't find the question asked anywhere, nor evidence that would allow me to answer it.

So maybe it is not a good question.

But it's my website, and I'm going to ask it anyway.

It's about that photograph of President Barack Obama released by the White House reportedly showing him skeet shooting.  Maybe it's legit.  I don't know.

But before I get to my question, let me ask you this:

Do any of you remember Michael Dukakis?

Children, he ran for President against George H.W. Bush -- the first Bush -- in 1988.   He was the governor of Massachusetts.   In July 1988, he was leading Bush in the polls 55%-38%.   ("Dukakis Widens Lead, According to New Poll")

He lost.

Lost pretty bad.  Back in those days, the Republican states were blue.

Part of the reason he lost was because he, or his handlers, thought the public was stupid, and the public figured it out.

I'm not sure if he was one of the closest things to a pacifist we've ever had asking people to vote for him to have charge of defending the country.   But it is not unfair to say that, as these things were judged back then, he was, uh, soft on defense.

Everybody knew this.  Didn't seem to hurt him in the polls.  But his handlers were worried.

To fight back against the Bush campaign's charges of excessive doveishness, his handlers had what they thought was a bright idea.

They suited him up in tank-corps duds, plopped him into an M1 Abrams tank, and turned the camera on as he tootled around, grinning and waving.  Believing that this exhibition would, if not demonstrate, at least symbolize, his deep devotion to national defense.

Didn't work.

Backfired.

He looked like a Westminster poodle sniffing for IED's on a Kabul backroad.

The Republicans converted that footage into a campaign ad that ran the clip of his tanky perambulations under a text purporting to describe his positions opposing various defense initiatives.  (Dukakis Tank Commercial)

Dukakis lost for lots of other reasons.   He took enormous heat for his unbelievable record of commuting the sentences of murderers -- 21 first-degree murderers, and 23 second-degree murderers -- dramatized by the Republicans in the famous "Willie Horton" ads.

Also, in those more enlightened times, my children, it was actually possible to be too left-of-center to be elected.

(And, my Republican pals, let's not forget G.H.W. Bush's "read-my-lips-no-new-taxes" fib.)  

But looking absolutely ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical, in that tank and combat getup could not have helped the governor.

Yes, folks, I thought of those warlike images of Dukakis when I saw the picture of POTUS firing the shotgun at the Camp David skeet range, offered by the White House in support of his earlier boast that "we do skeet shooting all the time," the WH apparently hoping to deflect the anger of his gun-owning constituents (a constituency that has grown dramatically in recent weeks) over what they had heard about his position on this part of their personal property.

The first thing I thought was:  Would someone who engaged in this activity "all time time" refer to it as "doing skeet shooting?"

But when I saw the photograph, I thought something else.

To make sure I wasn't being unfair to our President, since I do not do skeet shooting, I did some due diligence, which consisted of entering the phrase "skeet shooting" into the friendly Google pane, and clicking "Images."  Here are some of the first photos that popped up:

So as I understand matters, you get your gun ready, put the thing up to your shoulder, yell "pull" or belch or something, and the clay pigeon -- I guess it's not called a "skeet" -- launches up into the air and you shoot the gun at it hoping to strike it with some portion of your shotgun pellets.

The key phrase there, supported by the admittedly anecdotal evidence of my Google investigation, is "up into the air."

Now look at the photograph released by the White House:

There are some obvious problems with this portrait.  The dark glasses; no shoulder pad; an oddness in the form.  And only one photograph?  No proud pose next to the shattered clay pigeon?

But my question is:

What the heck is he shooting at?

For certain, despite a very slight upward angle to the barrel, nothing that is very far off the ground.

Perhaps he prefers to slay his clay pigeons when they're not moving and was launching a preemptive strike on the trap.

Perhaps he was exercising extreme deliberation, or extreme indecisiveness, and did not pull the trigger until the clay pigeon was approaching the earth.

Perhaps a drone -- or, better, a SEAL team -- had already taken out the clay pigeon followed by a hastily-arranged burial at sea observing all clay-pigeon post-mortem spiritual requirements -- and POTUS was just firing the gun for the photo op.

Perhaps there was no clay pigeon; no trap; no nothing.

Look, maybe he was firing at a duly launched clay pigeon.  I don't know.  But this photograph not only does his bona fides on gun ownership no good, its facial inauthenticity undermines the boast it was released to support.  And, as Governor Dukakis discovered with his own machismo initiative, it makes him look preposterous.

It's a freeze-frame parable of this man -- a lot of noise and smoke, looks good in jeans and shades, but, upon examination, nothing there.  The picture, the story, out knowledge of him, is incomplete.  Not what he says he is.  Not what others claim him to be.

As I say, I don't know the result of the President's assault on the clay pigeon, if any.

But I know that he's being rightly ridiculed for that mysterious photograph and his glib claim of firearms use that required its production.  (Google "obama skeet dukakis tank" and see what you get.)  

And his approval rating is starting to sink.  (I really wanted to write "starting to tank," but  .  .  .  no.)

Now that probably has something to do with people getting a look at their paychecks, come this new year.  And there's the inevitable buyer's remorse that follows any election.

But it may, just may, have a little something to do with people beginning to understand that their intelligence is being insulted.

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Prime Numbers Are Funny -- Further Potent Support

Awhile back, this site expressed the view, backed by little other than a priori reasoning, that prime numbers are the funniest subset of numbers -- if not intrinsically funny, at least funnier than non-prime numbers.  I expressed the view that if you need a number to make a funny point or illustrate a joke, you are better off with a prime than with numbers that are the products of primes.  I urge you to check out my essay here:  Prime Numbers Are Funny.

Now comes the news that the Farrelly Brothers are about to issue a new comedy.  The name?

"Movie 43."    (You can read about it here.)

Oh, it's a comedy all right, and you would know that even if you don't know that that's the kind of movies that the Farrelly Komedy Factory generate.  Here's a poster for it:

"Comedy exposed."  "The most outrageous comedy ever made."   If a movie like this is going to be designated by a numeral, there is only one possible choice -- a prime, which 43 is.

It's catching on, folks.  If you want the latest in pointeless pop culture theorizing you have got, just got, to come to The Cool Hot Center.

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I Return to the Scene of the Crime, Craving the Original

On Wednesday, June 10, 2010, I experienced one of the most astonishing catastrophes in the history of fast-food service at the Preston-Rolater KFC.  I recorded it for your benefit on the very same evening.  It remains one of the most frequently hit articles on this site.  You can find it here:

The Worst KFC Store in the Galaxy, and the Next One Over

and you might want to revisit that sad tale before you read any further.

I am here to report on a second example of appalling service at this establishment that took place on Sunday, December 2, 2012.

In fairness, I must report that I have made successful chicken and side-order purchases in the months since then.  It’s always dicey – order-fillers sometimes disappear into the bowels of the store to go looking for vendable chicken to fill the order, and order-takers seem to be in a constant state of unsupervised training.  (See below.)  But in most of these visits, excruciating clarity in ordering, followed up by a stern cross-examination of the server as to the contetns of the bags when he or she finally, breathlessly, delivers them, will usually result in an order approximating the one you issued before the body starts consuming itself with hunger.

The Dallas Cowboys were on TV that evening.  One might think that the store would have prepared for this, although, when I arrived at 5:15 – that's right, prime chicken-acquiring time – the store was not crowded nor was there a line of cars with inhabitants demanding the instant vending of chicken.  There was one woman in front of me.  A few customers in the dining room, including one family with two small children.

And I must point out that KFC is currently airing commercials advertising their "Gameday Bucket" showing sports-watching consumers with multiple buckets of fried chicken on the coffe table before them -- urging the public to travel to KFC to order these large quantities of chicken to enjoy while football games of interest are on during this season of interesting football games.  And there is no metro more concentrated on the viewing on the teevee of its team than DFW.

Point:  KFC strategic planning anticipates major chicken orders before big games, especially big games of intense local interest.

Tactical planning on the ground -- a different story.

The counter lad was the latest in an unending string of the undertrained.   He was almost inaudible and had a look of concerned puzzlement on his face.  The woman in front of me, a nicely dressed, literate human, was having a terrible time getting her order across to this guy, who stared mutely at the panel of selections before him on the cash register, and a colleague had to come and reach around him to poke at the proper buttons.

Suddenly, at the edge of my vision, I saw the mother of the family group in the dining room approach the counter.  She had brought with her the entire large platter of their dinner.  She spoke to someone who went to get someone else.  The someone else was a gentleman of around 50, dressed in a way that more-or-less conveyed the impression that he was the manager of the place.  It is the only time I can ever remember seeing anything resembling a mature adult officer at this establishment.  I wondered what he had been doing before he was summoned to deal with this dissatisfied client.  Hint -- not making chicken .

The woman was shaking her head and had a look of disgust on her face.  I could not hear her precise complaint.  I don't know if the order was wrong or the food was unsatisfactory.  I only know the family had barely touched it and they were submitting it for a refund.  The manager complied and the family left, taking their drinks with them.  (I did not interpret this dining strategy as being implement just to get free drinks.)

The woman ahead of me had completed giving her order and it was my turn.  I ordered my usual eight-piece all-dark Original – four drumsticks and four thighs, with cole slaw as my side order.

That order proved troublesome for the Yum! Foods/KFC Organization.

At 5:15 p.m. on a not-so-busy Sunday before an evening Cowboy game, this KFC was out of cole slaw.

I said OK, no  problem, skip the cole slaw.

I paid for my bucket.

A few moments later, I heard some mumbling going on behind the racks that held the chicken.  It was the counter guy and a couple of chicken-making guys.  I heard the word "drumstick."  There is only one reason for the counter guy to be discussing drumsticks in clandestine tones with guys in charge of preparing them, that being that this KFC did not have any to sell.  I was so certain of this interpretation that I spoke loudly enough to be heard through the chicken racks:  "That's OK, I'll just take all thighs." 

They looked up.  I had been correct.  That's right – no Original drumsticks at this time, a time when most properly-run restaurants would be ready to sell what has got to be one of single most iconic food items it offers, the Original drumstick.

Oh, Cool Hot Centrists, if it had ended there I would not be writing this.  

After a brief wait, another guy came out with the bad news – they did not have enough Original thighs to make up my order – would I like other Original pieces?

At this point, I was shaking my head and smiling.  No, I said – just fill out the order with Crispy thighs.

("Crispy thighs" – now there's an image to kill a romantic evening.)

I don't much care for the KFC Crispy preparation.  It has a faintly medicinal bouquet. 

But I took it.  I thanked them.

 

When I left the woman in front of me was still standing there.

 

Bucket of Original Dark,
ambrosial tasty skin falling off  the delectable grease-infused meat
 -- image available online,if  not at the Preston-Rolater KFC

I wondered as I got into the car whether the order the disgruntled family had returned might possibly have had as one of its constituents some un-nibbled Original thighs.

 

 

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MINI BOOK REVIEW: Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose (Yes, That's Really Her Name)

===========================

I can pinpoint the moment when I more or less gave up on "serious" American fiction.  Probably about 15 years ago.  The book was Susan Minot's Evening.

The book was hugely praised, as had been her previous short stories and novels.  Raves from all quarters.

I overcame my negative reaction to the photograph of the author on the back cover -- I'd purchased it in hardcover -- which struck me as self-satisfied and somehow unserious for an author of serious fiction:



All right, it's unfair.  But I didn't judge the book by its cover.  I bought it and I started to read it.

In fairness to Ms. Minot, I had been souring on serious American fiction for a long time.  By "serious" fiction, I mean fiction that aspires to be literature, to be art.  This would exclude most modern crime and "best-seller" romantic fiction, although some would call (for example) what Elmore Leonard does "literature," and I would not entirely disagree with them.  Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, absolutely.   I'm talking about fiction that explores fundamental human issues like love, freedom, power, sexuality, family, memory, God, gods, truth, beauty, and what to do with one's damned life.  I had been reading American literature, past and present, for a long time, before I had to start reading law texts and since I was able to stop, and there was a time when I loved much of what I selected. 

But sometime in the early-to-mid Nineties, I started hitting some clinkers.  Novels and short stories both.  I blamed the academy, notably the Iowa Writers Workshop, whose graduates were turning out dull, solipsistic fiction about extremely uninteresting humans.  And of course there was that old villain, the New York Literary Establishment, a bunch of people who all went to the same parties and who reinforced one another's judgments about the Bright Young Things that were emerging amongst the baby boomers.

So maybe I was unfair when I stopped reading Evening about a third of the way into it.  I thought I might be able to pinpoint the page.  Sometimes when I put a book aside, which is not often, I'll leave a bookmark in there, thinking I might come back to it.  I just went to my library -- nope, apparently I did not think it could be salvaged.

My memory of it is vague.  A woman was dying.  There were recollections of love affairs, betrayal of friends and lovers, I think.  There was not an appealing or affirmative character in the bunch.  Mostly women, as I recall.  Nothing wrong with that; they just weren't interesting or likable women.  Their thoughts were pedestrian, their urges dully sexual.   (I admire many female authors:  Willa Cather, Grace Paley, Flannery O'Connor, Jayne Anne Phillips, to name a few.)   I think there was a sister or best friend involved somehow.  I don't remember what I thought of the writing, but I can tell you that during this period, the Minimalists (Ann Beattie and the like) had seriously infiltrated American fiction, misunderstanding the appeal of Hemingway and writing in prose so plain that it had the unintentional effect of revealing with great clarity that the authors had little of interest to convey.  This book was like that.

So I stopped buying new serious fiction.  My next read?  Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and that was that -- I began devouring crime fiction and never really went back.  (Two marvelous exceptions:  Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest -- both leading candidates for Great American Novel -- really, Martin Amis has so nominated Augie March.)  And I started reading poetry. 

I was in a bookstore at Logan Airport recently and my eye rested on Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer.  If there is one thing I like as much as reading fiction, it's reading about writing fiction.  I probably have forty books about writing reposing in my library. 

I loved it.  It consists of very close readings of excerpts of word use, sentences, paragraphs, narrative, dialogue, and other literary devices mostly taken from classical literature -- interestingly, comparatively few examples from modern English-language fiction.  Her readings were convincing and themselves delightful reading.   It made me remember the pleasure I took (and still take) from great writing, from careful prose no less evocative for being careful. 

It also made me remember that I had a book sitting on my shelf that had been a Christmas gift two years ago from a reader whose intelligence, taste, and judgment I trusted:  Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award and lavishly reviewed everywhere.  Oprah and Obama both raved about it.  Although you may remember Franzen from his dustup with Oprah when he declined to cooperate with Oprah's selection of his previous smash hit, The Corrections, for her Book Club.  Apparently, she had no hard feelings.

It's next on my list.

I'll give you a report.

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N.B.:  I just checked Susan Minot's Wikipedia entry.  Evening was published in 1998.  She published one other novel (Rapture, 2002), and that was it. 

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I Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way I Probably Think the Wind Might Conceivably Be Blowing, Possibly

I am not a student of electoral trends and I am not good at predicting the results of elections.  

 

For example, earlier on in 2008, I believed that Obama would suffer a loss of McGovernesque (RIP) proportions.  I lived in Chicago.  I knew about Obama.  I knew him to be an impressive-appearing-and-sounding pol.  I knew him to be far left of the American mainstream.  I knew him to be a poorly-regarded state legislator and an undistinguished Representative.  I knew he had never accomplished much of anything else in his life, nor could I describe a single community organizational initiative with which he had been associated.  I believed that these things would become known to the electorate.  

 

Obviously, there were some things I did not know.  I did not know John McCain would be such a weak, old, candidate, or that he would make the Palin misstep.  I knew of the electorate’s deep dissatisfaction with George Bush (I shared it), but did not know how profound that revulsion was.  I assumed Obama would disguise his leftism, but I did not foresee the mainstream media’s wholesale abdication of its duty to report what it knew, or should have known, or should have discovered about the man if it cared to stand back from its lover’s blindly protective embrace.  By the time the election rolled around, I was not under any illusions as to its outcome.

 

This time around, the auspices were not much more comforting.  With the exception of Fox News and The Drudge Report – formidable exceptions, to be sure – the media’s coverage of the Administration and the campaign has run true to their 2008 form.  The layout of the electoral college appeared to be seriously tilted against Romney.  The polls in the swing states didn’t look good for the GOP.

 

And then there’s that immovable 47%.  Saw a great article on who is supporting the President that I thought hit the nail on the head – of course, I’ve lost track of it and I’m not going to remember all of its points.  It’s blacks; Hispanics to a somewhat lesser extent; people who rely on the government for welfare or employment or contracts, a truly frightening slice of the electorate; and college graduates steeped in “social justice” theory and socialist/collectivist economic and political dogma.  And, of course, there are those people who cannot shake off the romance of a skinny black "cool" president.  Others, of course.   

 

These people are not insincere or dumb (at least, not in numbers any greater than those on the other side) – they may really think that the socialization of medicine and cheap doctors is a good idea, and are happy to support and defend everything the President has done.  I’m not arguing with them here.  The point is, there’s nothing Republicans can do about those people (just like there’s nothing the Democrats can do with the Tea Party folks), and Romney needs pretty much everyone else, in addition to a major change in the prospects in the swing states.  

 

So post-conventions, things did not look good for Romney.  And I'm hearing that early voting in some swing states is favoring POTUS.   On this Election Eve, the polls still give Obama a decided edge in the Electoral College.

 

But for awhile now, I have had a feeling that Romney was going to win.   I felt that yeah, there’s a good chance Romney is going to get a lot of those undecideds and things were going to tighten up in enough of those swing states to give him the victory.  I see the Electoral College polls that continue to give Obama the swing states and the election. But I just get a feeling that the President is going to be defeated, possibly decisively.

 

I think the President believes it too. 

 

In the closing days of the campaign, he has become increasingly angry. He is astounded that the electorate no longer perceives his magnificence and inevitability.  His remark the other day that "voting is the best revenge" perfectly portrays his smallness, his bitterness, and his conviction that the American system is an oppressive one against which "revenge" must be taken through his policies attacking it.

 

I'm prepared to be wrong about that prediction.  But I think I'm right about a larger point this election is likely to prove:    

 

In important respects, even if he secures another term, Barack Obama has already lost.  

 

Because as this dreary administration stumbled through its term, certain things were becoming clear about this President to a whole lot of people who voted for him in 2008.  An administration that began with such excitement over its historical grooviness has grown pouty, angry, and even smutty.  Many people who didn't vote for the man, like me, were willing to see whether his administration would usher in an era of bipartisanship, improved race relations and international harmony.  

 

But the promise was false, the man himself not what he pretended to be.  And the media could not possibly cover it up over the course of a campaign where people really had to think had about who they’d put in the White House.  Even if he wins, it will be the victory of a hack, the baleful legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society spawning a host of hands-out Democratic client constituencies -- not a glorious affirmation of the wisdom of inclusion.

 

I started ticking off the reasons this election is even close after Barack Obama’s extraordinary electoral achievement of 2008, and each time I return to this draft I think of a couple more.  But I'll stop with an even dozen:

 

            (1)        His Policies Don’t Work and Will Damage the Country Even More as Time Goes By.    I’ll pass this – too big a topic for this entry, and others have done a more thorough job on any one of them than I could. 

 

            (2)      When It Comes to His Job, He's Lazy and Disengaged.  He makes George Bush look like a paragon of concentration and a dervish of productivity.  Historic levels of golf.   Many parties – Michelle especially loves them, and vacations.  Can't be bothered to attend national security briefings.   And did you read that article by Obama fan Ryan Lizza in Obama fanmag The New Yorker?  His style of decisionmaking is to examine checklists created by aids that he writes little comments on or checks off ("OK").  He doesn't like to meet with people.  He really doesn't like to do press conferences.  I was not at all surprised at his game-changing performance in the first debate – stories of his loathing of studying up for it had been circulating for some time.  

 

            (3)        In Fact, He Doesn't Like to Be Questioned At All and Is Discomfited and Angry When Challenged.   Because a guy who's gotten promoted on a record of near-zero accomplishments in private or public life is not going to be able to answer those questions or bat back those challenges.  And because he is not, in fact, “eloquent.”

 

            (4)        Now That We See that He's Not All That Capable, that Shadowy Personal History Starts to Matter.  He can't help it that his parents were who they were or that his father was unreliable and gone.  But he could have done a whole lot more to put the Kenya/Hawaii business to bed, and he behaved badly about it even when that somewhat peculiar birth certificate finally emerged (and was peculiarly exposed to a friendly press) –I wrote about it here, my point being that Obama does not think where he was born should matter, the Constitution notwithstanding.  I think he was born in Hawaii, but does anyone really believe that the 1991 book promotion blurb saying he was born in Kenya was an error deliberately introduced solely by his agent or anyone else?  Wouldn’t you like to see what he put on his college application? 

 

            It is now pretty widely accepted that he did not compose Dreams from My Father, but that it was written by radical professor William Ayres.  And that much of that book is (1) put generously, a composite of experiences and people (including women) Obama claims to have experienced and known and not a reliable autobiography, and (2) put ungenerously, false.  His academic career?  Extraordinarily opaque.   Evidence of self-composed “eloquence”?  Similarly missing.  His mysterious world travels, his contacts, his ties to radicals, his ties to race hustlers like Rev. Wright, his financial support – smoke/fire.  There remains much about this man that is unknown, and that is going to come out sometime, whether or not he is elected.  Like the Kennedys’ incredible womanizing while in office, there will come a time when we will be staggered at the character of the man we elected, and some of us loved.

 

           (5)        If Anything, His Policies and Attitudes Have Exacerbated Racial Tensions.   Even though his 2008 campaign repudiation of Jeremiah Wright was half-hearted, it was a step in the right direction.  I thought we would hear more about the value of education and other critical steps to continued improvement of race relations and the economic circumstances of urban blacks.  We did not.  The message continued to be the standard Democratic line of continued dependence.    He has been entirely content to let his supporters accuse his critics of racism.  His economic and labor policies have discouraged employment.  On balance, resentment over Democratic celebration of his mediocre tenure has fueled interracial suspicion – yep, contrary to the hagiography, his story is one of affirmative action writ large.

 

            (6)        It's Really True – He Believes in the Forced Redistribution of Wealth.  And I don't mean "wealth" in the sense of "a whole lot of money owned by people we would all agree are 'rich,' whatever that really means," I mean "assets owned by a person who has more than another person, irrespective of talent, industry, judgment, family, and other circumstances not controllable by the state."  His morality – in fact, the morality of much of the left – is that forcibly leveling prosperity is “right,” irrespective of the tendency of that policy to retard economic progress.

 

            (7)        It's Really True – He Believes that the United States Has Been a Force for Ill in the World, and that the Principles of Freedom and Capitalism Should Not Be Promoted.  No doubt the U.S. has made mistakes as a world leader, and has proceeded clumsily and sometimes corruptly.  On balance, though, the United States has been and remains (so far) a beacon of freedom, opportunity, and progress.  This President believes in the same leveling of countries that he promotes among persons of unequal wealth in the country he runs. 

 

            (8)        He's Actually Rather Unpleasant.   Mitt Romney suggested in his (disappointingly bland and shallow) convention speech that Obama is a nice guy.  I don’t think he’s a nice guy.  I think he’s motivated by jealousy and insecurity and this campaign is Exhibit 1.     He believes that wealth and merit should be punished, is an adversary to be defeated.  His campaign has been angry and negative.  He has refused to lend his personal charm to Democratic candidates.  His bus can’t move, there are so many corpses stacked under it.  The buck always stops well short of him.   

 

           Every president must have a healthy-self regard, but he is singular in is inability to disguise an ego bordering on megalomania.  The comparative frequency of his use of “I” in his public addresses is well-documented. 



Can you imagine any other campaign releasing a formal photo like this?

 

            (9)        It Matters that He's Never Accomplished Anything, Other than Electorally.   The public was aware of his lack of work experience and his relative lack of legislative experience, and that experience was decidedly lackluster (and notably unindustrious).  This was deemed not to matter with his personal charm and exciting message on the other side of the scale.  But now that that charm and message are in tatters, voters are recalling that this guy is pretty much just a guy, nothing more.  

 

            (10)        His 2008 Posture of Moderate Bipartisanship Was a Fraud.   No one, not even the 47%, is any longer claiming that he is a moderate or interested in bipartisanship.  I’m not a big fan of bipartisanship myself where principles are at stake, but the point is that this is how he held himself out, and how the media portrayed him, and why the center voted for him.

 

            (11)      He Is Protected by a Biased and Dishonest Media Establishment.  Speaking of which, his coddling by the mainstream media is undeniable.  You can howl about Drudge and Fox News all you want, but they are the exception and do not self-righteously deny their opposition to POTUS.   For the purposes of this list, the point is not whether either of the sides is right or wrong, it’s that the public can see that the MSM is steadfastly refusing to report carefully on this administration, and they resent it. 

 

 

            (12)      He Believes that He is Historically Inevitable.  And believes as well that that is a substitute for positive governing results.  Many of the moderates and undecideds who were caught up in the historic possibility of our first black president – and one with undeniable charisma when his fury over opposition isn’t bubbling to the surface – now perceive that the drama of his election was just that, a drama, a story, show biz.  They suspended disbelief and went with that story, but the second act has been a bust.  The President, however, has the sand to make “Forward” his campaign theme, and Mrs. Obama was caught the other day exhorting a crowd to think ahead to the wonders that can be accomplished if her man is awarded four more years.  But he has not proven to be an inspirational leader, or, in the solitude he’s most comfortable with, any other kind of a leader.  The mythology constructed for his 2008 campaign was brilliant – but, in the end, only a myth.  His presidency is no more a natural result of historical forces than is the administration on Mt. Olympus.

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The reader will have noticed I didn’t say anything positive about Mitt Romney.  It is true that among the reasons I have voted for him is that he is not Barack Obama.  But he has run a strong campaign, he has a strong record of public and private achievement, he supports American capitalism, and he believes in American exceptionalism in the world.  Lots of reasons to vote for the man.

I’m caught up in his momentum and I am not going to deny that I believe the momentum will carry him to victory because I want to believe it.  Even if he loses, though, Barack Obama will be governing a country where more and more people have found him out. 

The textbooks of the future will dutifully report his historical significance.  The illusion of transcendence, however, has evaporated.  The promise of competence, a murky half-remembered dream.  For many of us – including those of us who did not vote for him but who were ready for a fresh breeze blowing through the White House – his defeat is already assured.