- I woke up last Sunday morning after a satisfying night
of sleep apnea, rolled over sideways, and with one eye open, pressed the
remote. I felt wrong, distorted. Someone had mistaken my head for taffy
during the night, and left it twisted, elongated. My lips were up around
my forehead, my ears under my chin. The Santa Anas breathed shallowly through
an opened window, and I took a big inhalation of good, clean, fresh sulphur
from the latest Malibu holocaust. My throat was about as moist as King
Tut's.
-
- "This," I thought, "is the life."
-
- I stared at the black window to nowhere across the room,
waiting for it to give forth with the usual array of whitened teeth and
ugly culture. Grinning, pretty idiots telling me about the weather, screaming
at me about Jesus, manically blabbering about juice blenders and ab-rollers
and E-Z Trade. Maybe I'd get lucky and CBS "Sunday Morning" would
have a feature about hummingbirds. But then, it would be narrated in the
usual slow half- shout, as if I am deaf and three-years-old.
-
-
-
-
- Oh, God. There was John McCain again on Stefanopoulos.
Talking about how "the surge" is "working," and other
insanities. In that deliberately restrained voice he cultivated to combat
the image that he privately tears weasels limb from limb, and eats them
raw. Schoolboy George soberly querying as if it all is so very important.
Sigh. Switch.
-
- Oh, God. Russert.
-
- Seeing these strange people creating popularly-accepted
'reality'...week after week...is oh, slightly less enervating than another
Bush speech. About on par - in terms of inspiring one to happy days - with
gangsta rap and the altruism of Paris Hilton. Russert has all the physical
nuance of a fried egg.
-
-
-
-
- I opened eye number two, or rather, the lid involuntarily
unsealed because it's too much work to just open one eye. And Russert was
introducing a hit-parade of louses. A police line-up worthy of Dick Tracy.
The cast of the re-make of "Freaks."
-
- These were "political advisors." People who,
how shall we put this, feed on the detritus and excrement of American politics,
vomit it up as "strategy," and bank small mountains of gold bullion
in Swiss accounts. They "advise" candidates how to manipulate
public opinion to their advantage, which this country has forgotten is
fraud and con-art. They are pimps, whores, shills, hucksters, perverts---why,
rather like the people who hire them. The difference being that they are
not deranged enough to crave public office.
-
- And there they were. . . "Republican Mike Murphy"
and "Democrat Bob Shrum" (what was this, boxing?) who looked
like waxworks gargoyles, half-melted, or extras in bad Dickens adaptations.
And then, Romulus and Remus. . .Master and Blaster. . .The Hunchback and
his hump. . .James Carville and Mary Matalin. The salient question about
these two really is what their sex life is like. They are sitting on millions
and millions of bucks. Maybe billions. One video. One interview. In fact,
they should just do it on camera once a week. The dream of reality TV fully
realized. Screwing With the Stars! With your host, Larry Flynt. This week.
. .Matalin does Russert! Carville takes on the Spice Girls! No condoms!
-
-
-
- Separated at birth?
-
-
- Carville is straight out of Ray Harryhausen. He needs
a couple of red bat-wings (with the neat see-through skin) and a set of
razor talons. He opens his mouth, and you expect the shriek of the Hydra.
This is hobgoblin, not man. When he speaks, you see someone efficiently
and savagely separating raw flesh from bone, leaving the bone clean and
white. The voice is ferret chatter.
-
-
- Matalin & Carville: "Honey, you mah
fav-rit political poke-pie."
-
- Matalin, whose name amusingly recalls the original, Biblical
harlot, is, well, put it this way: hide your pit bulls. This woman feeds
largely on boiled testicles, perhaps not just metaphorically. Hair highlights
on her are like a tutu on a jackal. Lipstick? That's blood. Now, not meaning
to undermine the entertainment value of this piece with dull observation,
I must remind that he controls Democrap candidates, and she, Repugnicans.
What's more, she was actually part of the Bush crew designated to sell
lies and propaganda about Iraq, great patriot that she is. Oh, but Russert
doesn't care. Perhaps she ties him up after the show.
-
- "And welcome all," said Russert, in that insipid
urgent-journalist voice. "Happy belated Thanksgiving. We're back here
at the dinner table, so let's carve up the politics."
-
- Drool, drool. He made up a holiday metaphor! Politics?
I mean, they're talking about whether either of two crazed fascist Jesus
Freaks, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee (who with names like that should
be running a good, dishonest carnival) can spend enough money to scare
enough Living Tuna Sandwiches in Iowa into "supporting" them,
fer crissakes. They're talking about that New York ghoul who sucks the
marrow out of 9/11, Rudy "The Creeper" Giuliani. They're talking
about the chances of an actor with cancer, Fred Thompson, who Richard Nixon
pronounced "dumb as hell," of leading this grate nashum. They
refer to Hillary Clinton as. . .a liberal!
-
- I lay there, staring at this ghastly, festering puss-pit
that is passed off as the real world, brought to you by Boeing global warming
passenger airliners. I had the sensation of staring through a crack in
time, watching an ancient, primitive civilization run by murderous half-monkeys.
How is it, I wanted to shout, that you don't see how much better everything
could be? You have the technology! You've been given a paradise!
-
- Switch.
-
- The rest of TV Land was a nightmarish, garish, ADHD-
friendly swamp of choirs singing about Jay-sush, some crazy blonde bitch
claiming to be a minister, Latina-women displaying most of their zeppelin-sized
breasts as they hawked SUV's, an infomercial for the complete "Midnight
Special" collection with clips of great and awful '70's bands and
singers that made them look too alive again for comfort, Chris Wallace
proudly displaying his absent double-chin, Koreans shouting about Jay-sush,
and yet another re-run of that lightweight shaved-headed joker, Dr. Wayne
Dyer, and his fabulously profitable Muzak version of Buddhism. I don't
know, sometimes I think I see these programs when they aren't even there.
It's all a mish-mosh of smiley evildoing. No wonder children are cynics.
-
- Then I hit nirvana. It walloped me.
-
- I mean it. It was like crawling up, seared and half-
dead, from the smoking recesses of hell, and seeing roses and green fields.
It was like a sixteen-year-old Afghan kid touching the ground of his homeland
after two or three years in a Gitmo cage. It was like that first taste
of Wild Turkey to George W. Bush, a cat's tail in a dog's mouth, a doctor
speaking the word, "benign," a 1959 Christmas, a Monet in a house
of Thomas Kincades, a bird to the Birdman of Alcatraz, a cigar to the Frankenstein
monster.
-
- Smoke...gooooooooooood.
-
- I sat up.
-
- There they were. On Channel 5. It was really, really
them.
-
- The Three Stooges.
-
- I could not believe it. Just the black-and-whiteness
of it all was gorgeous, unreal. A harkening back to the days before entertainment
and reality merged. Before people learned to speak and think by watching
Oprah and Battlestar Galactica. Before 40- year-old teenagers took over
the news. It had been so long since I had seen anything like this on commercial
television, I had forgotten it was possible. Yet when I was younger, so
much younger than todayyyyy, TV was black-and-white, and chocked full of
old movies and good cartoons and even newsfolk who knew how to read and
write and speak and. . .report news. But enough self-pity---the Stooges
hit me like the return of Jay-sush.
-
-
-
-
- They were beautiful. They were poetic. They were art.
Moronic, idiotic, chaotic...to perfection! Moe. Larry. Curly. What sculpture.
There is nothing that looks that good today. Nothing as distinctive and
memorable in all of show business. Only Laurel and Hardy had them beat
for sheer style.
-
- There they were, being mistaken for plumbers, making
all electrical outlets in a hoity-toity household (of course) spew water.
I'd seen it a million times, but not for a million years. The chicanery
of it all! The anarchy! The delerious disrespect. The brutish rejection
of authority, of the monied elite, of pretentiousness, falseness. The opposite
of the butt-licking, conformity-compelled, hyper-gimme, celebrity-sucking
pursuit of acceptance and wealth that infects all aspects of modern Amerrygun
culture. No phoney smiling here! No sniveling for success! No "players"
scratching each other's backs. No supplicating to Simon Cowell. These guys
were one big eye-poking, cheek-slapping, woo-wooing Screw You.
-
- I nearly cried.
-
- Yes, there they were, being transformed into "gentlemen"
(click) on a bet---it makes you giddy, just thinking about it---that goes
no more awry than the occupation of Iraq. Curly gets that spring stuck
on his ass, bounces around the dance
floor (click) with that giant Amazon dowager, and the boys eventually
convert the upper crust to the Ways of the Stooge.
-
- Hail, Porcupine! Joy, thou spark of light immortal, daughter
of Elysium! (Channel 5, it turns out, had gone temporarily sane with a
60-hour "retro" weekend, chocked full of shows from the 50s,
60s, 70s. Whatever possessed someone at that station to come up with such
a logical and good idea is beyond me. He or she will be fired soon.)
-
- I switched back to Russert and Matalin and Carville---woo
woo woo woo! Hey Moe! Hey Larry! These three goons should have been extras
in Stooges films. They would have better served humanity that way. Tragic
that the opportunity has passed.
-
- Matalin and Carville would have been the things that
hide in the closet and scare the crap out of Curly, and Russert maybe the
fat cop on the beat, or the warden, or the blowhard mayor. These gum-flappers,
of course, are the real stooges, and Stefanopoulos, Wallace, and the rest.
How badly they need the boys to slap them around, make water pour out of
Russert's headset and microphone, bake a cake that explodes in Wallace's
face, poke Stefanopoulos in the eyes when he turns on the fake grim look
as he introduces the weekly body count, and the fake "isn't that funny"
smile after the clips of Leno, Letterman on "The Sunday Funnies."
-
- How badly George W. Bush needs to be asked, "see
that?" (when Moe holds his hand out and tells Curly to hit it...only
to have Moe's arm windmill around and bash Curly on the head). How badly
Laura Bush needs to dance with Curly, and have him accidentally pull her
dress off with his foot. How badly this country needs to have its fraudulence
and vainglory unmasked, mocked, and humiliated. How badly this country
needs to be converted to the Ways of the Stooge.
-
- Paging Dr. Howard! Dr. Fine! Dr. Howard!
- _____
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-
- Mail Rip at rip@riprense.com
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