--- Just call him John

--- Just call him John “Cut to the Chase” Kerry.

I’m tempted to give him points for just wanting to skip through all the bullshit.

Naaaaaah

As far as Operation: Libermania,
well…massive sigh.
I used to live in one of those early states. And I all I can say is I
offer my full-fledged sympathies for all the regular stiffs who live in
either New Hampshire or Iowa. I recommend getting a Rottweiler and
caller-id if you don’t want the campaigns to contact you.
Contrary to what the media would have you believe, the normal joe in
either state wants nothing to do with all of the political b.s. that
drops in on their doorstep, like manna from hell, every four years.
It’s a boost to the economy, that’s true: an old server friend of
mine made three hundred bucks in tips from Tom Brokaw one night before
the caucuses. He paid her rent that month. It’s also interesting to
watch, honestly, because all of these people you know aren’t
political the other 364 days out of the year suddenly turn into
analysts of the first order and you get a really
good idea of which farmers to pay attention to. But you really don’t
want to be a registered voter in either place because when a
candidate’s campaign calls your house six times within a forty-eight
hour period before the caucuses, reminding you to make sure you go and support our candidate
it gets a wee bit annoying. And that’s just one candidate. We’re
not talking about the other nine who might be on the ballot who want
your vote just as much as the other guy does.
Before the 1996 caucuses, I actually had to disconnect my phone because
Bob Dole’s campaign wouldn’t stop calling. They had some database
problems, obviously. One person would call, then a half hour later,
another would call, you’d tell them they were annoying you, they’d
apologize and then a day later, you’d get another call…then
another, and so on and so forth. Say nothing of Lamar Alexander’s
campaign, or Pat Buchanan’s or any of the other nimrods who were in
the running.
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, trashed the t-shirt and am
now using it to clean the bottom of the toilet. --- Halle-freakin’-lujah!

But did he get the ring back?

--- This is curious.
So, they won’t rush into a burning girls’ school because they’re
worried about modesty issues, but they’ll rescue prisoners? That’s so nice.

@##%$%$#@$^%^*(&…!

---Hey, I watched Contact.
I remember that the first televised broadcast shot out into space was
Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. Maybe this is just the aliens answering
back? {Insert Twlight Zone music here}
--- Was at the drugstore the other day and wound up buying the 70th
Anniversary issue of Esquire.
Yes, I know: it’s a men’s magazine. So? I like it because it
confirms all those ideas I have about how men’s brains aren’t in
their heads, but instead reside in their crotches. It’s always nice
to be right, after all. So, I’m flipping through it and am somewhat
annoyed by all their nasty Bush comments, yet am impressed by Gay
Talese’s portrait of Frank Sinatra, which was picked by the editors
as the best feature ever published in Esquire,
and despite Talese’s annoying use of the term Negroes, I find myself
agreeing with them. I also liked their “Best Seventy Sentences”
ever feature. I sighed and skipped the obligatory tribute to Muhammed
Ali (honestly, who gives a crap about boxing? Ugh.) Then we got down to
who they considered to be “The Man of the Last Seventy Years.” And
who should it be but JFK
Ok, skip right over Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Gordon Moore, Watson and
Crick, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kirby, Winston Churchill, FDR, Charles De
Gaulle, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, just to name a few, and go
with the mushy, feel-good, boomer-idolizing President who squeaked into
office with fewer votes than the current occupant of the Oval Office
(Cook County Morgue, anyone?) and say that he’s
the most important man of the last seventy years? Whatever. I am so
fucking sick of Kennedys. Their whole golden-dynasty,
don’t-you-wish-you-were-one-of-us?, Camelot myth/PR campaign has
completely backfired on me. The media laps it up, though, and so we are
subjected to more and more books about the affairs JFK had, how ill he
was, how classy Jackie was (and she was classy, I’m not denying
that), how JFK Jr. was being smacked around by his perfect blonde wife,
ad nauseum, ad infinitum. I am sick of the Kennedys.
Gag-me-with-a-spoon sick. If I have to listen to one more friggin’
minute of Michael Skakel’s (the Kennedy cousin) garbage on CNN,
I’ll puke. But this article was beyond the pale. Despite the fact
it’s Oliver Stone-y in its tone (ya know, it was the
military-industrial complex who brought this fine specimen of a man
down because he wanted to pull out of Vietnam and they killed him
before he could do so…the Mr. X speech delivered so convincingly by
Donald Sutherland in the movie), it’s complete and utter fluff. I’m
not going to touch that because it would be too easy. However, the man
who wrote it, Charles P. Pierce, claimed in his little “about the
contributors” spiel that “…we
thought that this is the most important guy in the history of our
magazine because of the way he changed almost everything---not only how
politicians act, but how we look at how they act.” Thanks, Mr.
Pierce! I thought it was enough to pin JFK’s ass to the wall over the
landmine-ridden relations with Cuba and Cuban-Americans we now endure
because he didn’t provide air support at the Bay of Pigs. Now I
realize I can blame the sleazy fiasco American politics has become on
the martyr who was the most celebrated, most fawned over, most admired
President of the past forty years. JFK. I so appreciate it.

“In his study of the Kennedy presidency, author Richard Reeves
quotes Kennedy himself as a center of a spoked wheel and, in doing so,
inadvertently posing a insoluble riddle to what would become, after his
death, a nation of his biographers. By the time he got to Dallas, John
Kennedy had grown comfortable with living in the plural.
“It was instinctive,” Kennedy said. “I had different identities,
and this was a useful way of expressing each without compromising the
others.” There were always enough John Kennedys to be so many things
to so many different people. There were enough of them to keep his
options open---in Cuba and in bed, in Vietnam and in Palm Springs.
There were enough of them, always, so some of them were sure to get in
the way.”
At its beginning, there in Los Angeles, this new frontier was supposed
to be cool and ironic, technocratic and rational, settled by scientists
and thinkers and theoreticians. But frontiers are wild and uncivilized
places where people struggle to survive, where people die over private
grudges, where people, a lot of people, carry guns and feel the need to
use them. John Kennedy needed all the identities he’d fashioned for
himself.
His White House---and the executive establishment that it purported to
lead---was a writhing ball of snakes. The issue of civil rights had
moved swiftly past the hope of any easy compromise. Elsewhere, there
were off-the-books attempts to kill Fidel Castro, covert wranglings
(among other places) Iraq… A rat’s nest was growing in Southeast
Asia to which there seemed no solution. The Joint Chiefs were barely
under control, and the various intelligence agencies vanished into the
dark-blue evening distance of the frontier that John Kennedy had
decalred could be found the nation’s best new hope, paying any price
and bearing any burden, from the Bay of Pigs to the Mekong Delta.
In 1960, John Kennedy got up in Los Angeles and promised to make all
things new. In his murder three years later, he managed that trick for
ages.”
Pierce goes on to chat about how suspicious Kennedy’s assassination
was. I’ll grant him, it was suspicious. I don’t buy the Warren
Commission’s findings more than anyone else does, but Pierce makes
the argument that since Kennedy lived in the plural, died in the
plural, we are now stuck in the plural.

“John Kennedy lived plural lives. Nobody—no sad, pathetic he; no
dark, conniving they---could have possibly killed them all.”

“”You see the creation of an iconic figure,” says Robert
Dallek, the historian who spent five years poring over documents in the
library to produce the most recent biography of Kennedy. “On the fact
of it, it seems overstated for the sixth-shortest presidency in
history. But you can see him learning. He was the first one to do live
TV press conferences, and what came out of those was the power of his
personality, his wit, his youth. He realized he could use TV to create
an image of himself…”
Not that any of this necessarily began with Kennedy. The political
utility of self-mythology was familiar to both Abraham Lincoln and
George Washington, and to Julius Caesar, for all that. But Kennedy
attached his candidacy to the emerging information media of the time
and to the emerging science of public opinion as surely as he attached
the rhetoric of the New Frontier to the exploding space-age
technologies, and he did it so well that his mythology still dwarfs
that of any other candidate who has come before or after him.”
Groovy. It’s clear now: the reason I have to listen to Howard Dean
shove as many sound-bites as he possibly can into a two-minute
interview on CNN is because JFK changed the political landscape. Gee,
thanks.
The plural lives John Kennedy lived are not something to be celebrated,
no matter what Mr. Pierce would have us believe. He asserts this is the
reason why no other president following his hero’s reign will ever
have the lasting legacy of JFK. “---Jimmy Carter’s church bells, Ronald Reagan’s little
parables, George H.W. Bush’s points of light, Bill Clinton’s place
called Hope, and a lot of the way that young George Bush attempted to
reconstruct the word after the towers fell. But none of them lasted,
not the way JFK has, and not because he died, either. He lasted because
he touched off the awesome forces of desire within the evolving human
heart of his times, before the heart itself knew they were even there,
before it had evolved enough to guard against them, before it had
hardened itself---as it has today, God knows---to see them coming.
Every political campaign since that one, including the one just
gathering steam, is nothing more than an aftershock.”
Gag. Sullivan should issue a Poseur Alert for that one. Why Pierce
thinks JFK’s many lives should be celebrated is obvious: he’s
enamored of the man. But it’s specious critical thinking, if, in
fact, any critical thinking was used in the writing of this piece,
which I suspect it wasn’t. JFK was a skilled politician, not a
leader.
The idea of plural lives in a politician is not something to be
admired. It’s something to be abhorred. It’s the antithesis of
leadership. If you are going to be many things to many different
people, how can you possibly know who you are and what
you are made of if you’re never called on to be consistent? A leader
may not always be consistent, it’s true, but being a leader means
explaining why you’re not being consistent if you can’t be. The
hand of fate interceded and Kennedy was never placed in such a position
where he had to defend himself on his inconsistent life. If you can be
many things to many people, how can you lead the masses if, by taking
such a position, you refuse to acknowledge that there are masses, but
many groups of special interests that need to be pandered to for votes
instead? Pierce has it wrong. JFK was a skilled politician; not the
be-all-end-all leader of our times. There’s a difference. Everyone
who has been elected to the Oval Office since his term has been
criticized for not being as skilled as JFK, for not being as personable
as JFK…the list goes on and on. Well, I don’t see any of those as
slams. I see them as a compliment. When did a lack of artifice become a
bad thing? A sign that the person who lacks the artifice is not someone
we want to lead us? Because, you know, JFK was all about artifice.
Pierce says so. Let’s be honest. The plural lives of JFK that Pierce
celebrates are also the nasty parts of JFK. The ones only a select few
knew about when he was alive. But since Pierce celebrates them, I want
to know why they show JFK was a good man, a good president and a good
leader. Being successfully covert about the fucking of a movie star
means what, precisely? That he’ll was able to keep his trap shut when
National Security secrets were involved? Lying to Americans about the
extent of his health problems was a good thing? Why? Because the
stupid, prejudiced American public would have discriminated against him
because of it? Having Sam Giancana to pull votes for him means JFK had
a good, insider idea of organized crime and his ideas on how to best
deal with it were based in reality? I don’t think so. It means the
man was a lying bastard who would do anything to obtain the presidency,
because he didn’t want to lead; he wanted to hold the office. ---
Chuckle of the Day. Ouch.
Why does it seem all the idiots live in Germany nowadays? Better
question would be what the hell did they need a chainsaw for? Wasn’t
Wusthof-Trident German enough for them? You can slice your finger off
quicker with one of those knives and unlike with a chainsaw, you
wouldn’t feel it.