News for sale

One of my biggest regrets from the years I spent working at “the agency” is that I failed to print and save an e-mail that was forwarded to more than 100 employees by one of the most hideous “senior leaders” of that period. The e-mail contained a very long conversation between a multi-million dollar client and her agency servants. The jist of it was that the client was unhappy with a certain publication – a big one – that continued to publish articles about the client’s company that weren’t exactly flattering. It should be pointed out that the articles were nowhere near as damaging as they should have been, but an appropriate level of damage would have required a reporter who knew how to ask questions, and really, honestly, let’s not get carried away here.

Since the articles weren’t exactly what the client wanted, the client announced at many points throughout the forwarded e-mail exchange, that “the time has come” to contact a VP of something or another at the publication who was several levels above the reporter’s head and remind him that the company being written about spent millions of dollars a year to advertise in that publication, millions of dollars, as we all know, that could easily be spent elsewhere. And then the PR people, who will say anything to curry favor, began to agree with her, gently at first, and then anything but. Why this e-mail chain was forwarded I will never know, but I was glad it was. Right there, in print, were a bunch of obscenely over-compensated spoiled brats openly, unapologetically throwing tantrums because their money wasn’t buying the kind of coverage to which they felt entitled. There’s certainly nothing illegal about that, but it was, at the time, the most blatant example of paying for ink that I’d ever seen. Imagine the fun I could have had had I printed that e-mail and sent it around here and there the old-fashioned way, in an envelope, with a stamp and a simple, easy-to-read return address: Anywhere U.S.A.

Years later, I am reminded of that exchange when I see certain pieces on television, and here, from recent weeks, are three of them.

Katie Couric recently promised to reveal “who is behind rising prices at the pump” after the commercial break. If you’re thinking that what’s behind rising gas prices in this country is the instability in the Middle East, think again. It’s the pensions earned by public employees. The oil stocks are managed and manipulated by speculators, and those speculators have been hired to manage the portfolios that pay for pensions of public employees in many states, including California, and in case you’ve missed the news, it’s the lavish pensions for public employees that are crashing the economy. Although I was not part of the editorial planning of this particular story, my guess is that someone paid a lot of money to remind people, as they pay more than $100 to fill the gas tanks of their SUVs, to remember to blame it on those damn state workers.

Another gem from Katie Couric went like this. She led a newscast with a report on the Wisconsin labor dispute. I was impressed by that, actually, but she quickly followed that story with one about the “hundreds of millions” of dollars that federal government employees had allegedly embezzled. Nothing has been done about the embezzlement, so the story went, because nobody has had the time to initiate legal action. This sequencing reminded me of the way that people are often tricked into identifying the wrong person during a lineup of suspects. Government employees in Wisconsin on strike, flash, government employees in Washington on … the take. And as long as we’re mixing one story into another, if reduced to a fraction, what fraction could be used to compare the “hundreds of millions” embezzled to the hundreds of billions handed over legally to bail out the big boys? How much advertising would a corporation have to threaten to cancel for that fraction to be erased from the piece? I’m not saying that’s what happened, of course. I am just explaining why I wonder: I cannot help myself.

The most lavish commercial disguised as news I’ve seen recently concerned a most lavish and most lavishly deceptive corporate sponsor: the Catholic church. Most of the 20-minute segment was an infomercial about the Archbishop of New York, a fat loud mouth who is, I’m sorry to say, a native of Saint Louis. All but about two and a half minutes were dedicated to one thing: showing us how ordinary and down-to-earth Tim Dolan is. He may be widely rumored to be number one on the list of candidates for pope should one from the U.S. ever be seriously considered, but on a day-to-day basis, he’s more concerned with helping and serving and glad-handing and stuffing his mouth with as much free food as he can manage and then washing it down with free beer.

While I would use a much different word to describe him, Morley Safer declared him “gregarious.” So we got to watch the big guy crash into meetings, shout greetings to admirers in hallways and on elevators and embrace young children – I couldn’t help but shudder – and return phone calls from the back seat of his limo as it sped across Manhattan. Though he doesn’t believe in equality for women or for gays – the smile he flashed while revealing his thoughts on those subjects was creepy even by pedophile standards – he does have quite a sense of humor: He turned to someone seated beside him and barked, “And they say there’s nobody to the right of me!”

Laughed my ass off at that one.

For their many faults, Catholics are usually quite reverential toward the language, so I was surprised at how sloppy he was with certain words. He was asked at one point about the “outmoded” teachings of the church, and in his response he used the term “outmotived.” I don’t know if that’s a word or not; if it’s not, it should be. Outmotived. He also addressed Morley Safer many times as “Marley.” At one point Marley leaned forward and, as if he were on the verge of something profound, told the AB that he sensed that he was hiding something: Did the AB really not want the church to … change? Ahh shucks, well, in fact, yes, the AB does think the church should evolve along with the people it serves while still enjoying the rich spiritual heritage with which it’s been blessed. Gosh, Marley, you caught me! You’re pretty good!

Then, quickly, almost as a form of televised fine print: The church still has issues with child molesters and there are still new scandals that emerge from time to time. What did the AB have to say about that? Sit down for this one, friends, because it is indeed that good: In spite of the fact that he had to unload a lot of tax-free real estate during his stint in Wisconsin to underwrite the hanky panky there, he’s not one to wallow in the trauma of it all (which must be a pretty easy stance to take since the trauma isn’t really his). In fact, he’s grateful for the opportunity Catholics have had to cry together.

The End

Recent arrivals

On Tuesday morning I got together with a friend of mine who has the same opinion of his siblings’ child-rearing capabilities as I do of mine, which is to say, pretty low. My friend grew up on a ranch in Montana and witnessed what he believes was the end of the era when it was possible to carve out a living by managing an independent, family-operated agricultural enterprise. His nieces and nephews – the next generation – are young men and women who watch a lot of television, are shuttled to and from various after-school activities and eat a lot of processed food. Like my people, they don’t read much, aren’t really curious about anything and have zero drive. They sit around and whine a lot, treat their parents like servants (which, to my ongoing horror, is not only tolerated but encouraged) and often complain of being bored by the accessories of their unimaginatively accessorized lives. “They’re a perfect example of what happens the further you get from the immigrants,” he said. “You get a few generations from that and the spark is gone, and all that’s left are people who assume having an abundance of everything is just part of God’s plan.”

And here I thought I’d run out of ways to criticize my nieces and nephews and their parents! For the record, I was not raised by immigrants, but I was brought up by two people who were, and just thinking about working that little tid-bit into conversations the next time I’m with my relations made my eyes sparkle.

After having breakfast with my friend it does seem painfully obvious that being under the influence of parents whose ability to learn a brand new culture was not something to brag about on Facebook or in the holiday mass mailing but was, in fact, a matter of survival must have a drastically different impact on the youngsters than being raised by people whose main priority is that their children be popular, followed by a very close second main priority: making sure the children regard their parents not as authority figures but as friends. In my family, that difference is evident to say the least.

For some reason, by Tuesday afternoon I was exhausted, so I ate some dinner and took a bath earlier than usual, and by 8:00 I was on the couch with a cup of tea and before I’d realized what had happened I’d sat through an hour – a full hour – of Charlie Rose. His guests were a group of mayors of various U.S. cities. I think cities are interesting, so I watched. All of the mayors were male, of course, and all were white except for the mayors of Atlanta and Philadelphia, who were black. Before we nominate Charlie Rose for a diversity award, I do want to point out that having black mayors of those two cities is worth no more bonus points than electing a Catholic one in Saint Louis is. But for Charlie Rose, having two black guys who are neither entertainers nor athletes at the same table at the same time is a huge step in the right direction. Still, it was the Charlie Rose party, and Charlie Rose's commitment to the white male point of view is a hard habit to break: The mayor of Houston is a lesbian, but seated at the table talking about that city was a white guy, which was confusing to me until he answered one of the questions and I saw in the text at the bottom of the screen the word “former” as part of his title.

After a couple of rounds of kissing the mayor of New York City’s ass until it shone so brightly that studio lights really were not necessary, the conversation, much to my surprise, turned to immigration. Michael Bloomberg described the U.S. policy on immigration with one word: Dumb. The mayor of Minneapolis said that people can complain all they’d like about the Somalian immigrants in his city, but should the U.S. decide it wants to do business with Somalia, the tune will likely change. The mayor of San Diego said that universities in California educate many thousands of students from other countries in fields like engineering and computer science – fields in which the U.S. is woefully, inexcusably deficient – and then, upon graduation, they are refused entry and sent home because Republicans cannot stop claiming that we’re “tough on immigration.” And there’s an international airport, he added, less than a mile from the U.S.-Mexico border that handles a number of trans-Pacific flights, so why would we want to build a new one? He’s building a gate instead, so that international travelers can pay a small fee and walk from one country to another.

The former mayor of Houston mentioned two facts he doesn’t believe should co-exist. The first is that the U.S. has rapidly fallen behind many other countries when it comes to having the best and brightest engineers, scientists and doctors. And second, in California and Texas – two states that comprise an astounding percentage of the nation’s total post-secondary student population – the myth that higher education is an elitist-run luxury item that must be slashed until there’s nothing left but the barest of bones grows more powerful every time an elected Republican official utters takes the stage.

Michael Bloomberg said he’s dreading the day when he realizes that the winner of a Nobel Prize is a person who was turned away from this country as a result of our kneejerk reaction to short-term smear tactics.

Because thinking long-term – whether it’s toward the future, or back into the past – is, I suppose, more than you can reasonably expect of a populace that can be easily placated by shows like Two and a Half Men, one that is routinely basks in a sense of warmth when kitty cats are featured on the six o’clock news. For more than two centuries we’ve been arriving here by the thousands and then, once settled, insisting that someone lock the gates and toss the key. At various times in the not-so-distant past we’ve officially hated the Irish, the Italians, the Germans and “the Bohemians.” We really did it up with the Japanese. And now that we’re so comfortable that reading history books is considered an elitist pursuit, our well-fed youngsters – including, tragically, my parents’ grandchildren – have been given implicit permission to not consider where their accessories are manufactured, or by whom, and, at the same time, in a way that almost honors the ancestral experience, accept without question the PR that ignores the fact that the country is being robbed blind by the fanciest refugee camp in the land – Wall Street – and take the easy route instead: Honor the history of our country by following in the footsteps of past generations and blame the most recent arrivals, which in this case is people from Mexico, which is mighty ironic, given the fact that lots of our biggest and brightest states used to be Mexico, until we followed orders issued by God and made those territories our own. Of course, arriving at that understanding would require a bit of reading, which in turn would require the televisions and the iPods to be turned off, and I know as well as anyone that that’s asking a lot.

Basic provisions

After I paid my water bill last week, I went out and bought some more water – bottled water, a case of it in fact, shrink wrapped in plastic. To me, buying bottled water felt like failure. For one thing, I’ve always ridiculed the survivalist crowd, with its batteries and generators and dehydrated fruit and canned tuna and such. They strike me as a bit extreme, a bit paranoid, especially those who stockpile firearms. And running around in search of provisions after – and only after – succumbing to the urge of televised panic has always struck me as a tad herdish.

But there I was, forking over the cash for a case of safety. What drove me to the store, on the surface at least, was the earthquake in Japan, followed by a tsunami, the waves of which traveled at the same speed as a commercial jet. And that was followed, as we all now know, by a bit of nuclear horror that’s transformed iodine into a celebrity drug for those of us perched along the Ring of Fire.

My fear of earthquakes makes sense on one hand and, on the other, none. Having experienced one while on the seventh floor of a rickety old brick office building one morning, I have a very rational, logical respect for and fear of the authority the ground has when it begins to sway. On the illogical side of the equation, my most uncensored voice tells me that the place where I grew up is safer, that I should really pack it up while I can and go on home, which is completely ridiculous. In addition to the fact that Saint Louis is the most homicide-happy town in the U.S., Missouri is hardly free of peril when it comes to foundational instability. The only thing running through that territory that’s more mighty than the Mississippi is the New Madrid. Also in the realm of illogical is my hang-up about maps. I’ve lived here for 17 years and I still cannot look at a map of North America for more than a few seconds. Oregon is too close to the edge, and when I see that, when it’s forced upon me visually, I cannot help but imagine the western third or so of the state tilting up and out of the ground at a 45-degree angle and then, as if powered by a slingshot, being flung straight out into the Pacific. Just looking at it on paper makes me nervous.

So there I stood, buying a case of just-in-case water. The sensation was so shameful that I could barely make eye contact with the young woman running the register. This, I thought, it must feel something like this to not drink for a period of years and then, on an otherwise ordinary afternoon, as if guided by a very dark kind of radar, swerve right into the beer aisle and casually toss a 12-pack into the cart along with the canned kidney beans and organic eggs.

For a few weeks now I’ve been out of sorts. I blame it on the time change, I blame it on the weather, I blame it on turning, much to my shock and surprise, 45 years old. I blame it on Haiti, which is still a wasteland. I blame it on the fires and floods that not that long ago ravaged Australia. I blame it on the earthquakes in New Zealand. I blame it on the designers of nuclear power plants, who apparently did not factor tsunamis into their considerations in spite of the fact that word itself is, in fact, Japanese. I’m not sure what the people who have had quite enough in the Middle East are angling for exactly but my guess is that they are sick of living in tin shacks while their rulers, even those who are not officially kings, live according to the standards of royalty. In the case of the Middle East, my blame is directed at the irony: How beautiful, these brown, exotic people taking to the streets for liberty and justice and the right to assemble and be heard, and at the same time, isn’t it a stroke of heaven-sent genius that they are not employed by the State of Wisconsin?

So instead of watching and listening to the news, I’ve been reading Harper’s and The Sun. I’m reading Thomas Hardy and a novel by Barbara Kingsolver so full of sadness and despair that I wipe the table down with a soapy washcloth after reading – even if only a few pages – for fear that the blood and tears that gush off the pages will leave stains. Howard Zinn’s take on the causes of exactly the sort of stupidness I’m muddling through at the moment sits on the coffee table, patiently, silently. I’m avoiding the talk with the same resolve usually reserved for avoiding a love interest with whom it is clear, painfully, that there shall be no future.

My excursion into emergency provisions caused me to realize something, though. I’m not avoiding the news because of the content of it; I’m avoiding it because of what follows the announcement of each new calamity. From KBOO to KGW and pretty much everywhere in between, every natural disaster, every political collapse, every instance of money trumping might is greeted with dramatized disbelief that is expressed like this:

No way!

And that, I think, is what’s causing distress: I think it runs contrary to basic human instincts to not know where the provisions come from. I cannot resist pointing out that removing that knowledge, scrubbing us clean of that understanding, is the heart and soul, the bread and butter if you will, of marketing. When fresh produce grows at Safeway, when energy is invisible, when the particulars of retirement accounts and health insurance are conveyed not by someone whose face you recognize but via a slicked up Internet site, that frees us up to focus on more pressing issues like celebrities behaving badly and clever pets and precocious youngsters, videos of whom transcend You Tube and end up on the evening news so regularly that I can no longer get pissed off about it without really trying. And then, of course, when something basic runs off the rails, like the price of gas, or the diminishing – rapidly diminishing – returns on the 401k account, when something happens that would come as no surprise if we were paying attention, all hell breaks loose. We’re shocked, and we’re outraged.

So I started wondering. How is my house heated? It’s gas, I presume, since I get a bill from Northwest Natural every month. How does that gas get into the house? Hell if I know. There are two utility lines in and out of here, one, I presume, for electricity, the other for the phone. Which is which? There’s a line that comes right over my house from the front. Is that the lifeline for the people at the other end of the block? What exactly is our arrangement with various countries in the Middle East? In order for someone in this country to drive an SUV or to heat a 750 square foot home from late October until May, who has to give up what? I bought some spinach and a carton of mushrooms on Wednesday afternoon. Where did they come from? Is someone earning poverty-level wages to grow the spinach so that I can have a nice little salad in the middle of March? Is it really spinach that I ate? Are the mushrooms actually mushrooms or are they clever homage to the nuclear age? There are facilities around here, of course. Are they on or off? When I write out the check for my mortgage every month, where does that money go? Who has the deed to the house? When I make the call – as I will eventually – to change my long distance carrier, to whom, exactly, will I be speaking? What does Hazardous Materials actually mean? How natural is the natural gas provided by Northwest Natural?

Buying the bottled water didn’t make me feel better, of course. It’s just that I now know where one provision in this house came from – Safeway – and how it got here – I carried it – and where it is: It’s in my kitchen, in a cabinet, so when the kitchen collapses into the basement, I won’t have to do as much digging around to find water that’s not contaminated. It’s a start, I think.

Even on Saint Patrick's Day, I'm not green

A few weeks ago David Cobb was the guest on a weekly call-in show on KBOO, the community radio station in my beloved Portland. David Cobb, for those of you who don’t know, was once upon a time the Green Party’s presidential candidate. He came on for a chat with the host of the program who, if there were a contest for the smuggest, shrillest know-it-all in the Willamette Valley, would be a finalist if not the winner. They made a perfect match, I thought.

I’ve been arguing and thinking and talking about the Green Party since 2000, when I lived in an apartment building in Southeast Portland where most of the residents voted for Ralph Nader because, as they explained, there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. These people were quite fond of drumming circles, co-ops for food and co-ops for bicycle repairs and anything, as I recall, that even hinted at “ethnic.” This included beautiful woven blankets bought at some fair trade place, music – lots and lots of music – and various medicinal spices that came bottled and packaged with an abundance of Native American lore.

I’m a bitch with the keyboard. I know that. What I also know is that in writing this blog post, the challenge is not to remember enough details from 11 years ago to paint an accurate picture. The challenge is to keep this from becoming a book-length blog post, because the details are simply endless. In a way it’s a cheap shot to make fun of people for their music collections and the spices they use. But in another way, I think it’s a perfect metaphor for the Green Party. In the same way that owning a blanket woven in a village somewhere in Ecuador does not make you an expert on Central America, or reduce or excuse your contribution to the local comfort vs. global misery equation that is the U.S. economy, I don’t think the members of the Green Party, by simply signing on, are making even the slightest dent in the stranglehold that two major parties have on politics in the U.S. of A. In fact, I think they’re doing the exact opposite.

But back to 2000. There were two words that really captured the hearts and souls of my former neighbors: grass roots. Hence, Ralph Nader for President. So, believing that the root of grass roots take hold in the front yard, I started asking what they thought of the county commission, the city council, the school board. They had no idea. They frowned and glared and dismissed me with talking points no more original or thoughtful than those spewed forth by conservative Christians. And I, in response, quoted another KBOO hostess, who said of the Green Party one beautiful morning in 2000, “They just lookin for someplace to park they Volvo.”

So here we are 11 years later, and if the KBOO program was any indication, the only thing that’s changed with the Green Party crowd is that the Volvo got traded up for a Prius. We’re barely two years out of an eight-year administration headed by a man that was, according to the Green Party, no different than Al Gore. We’re involved, for now, in two wars, the schools are deplorable, we’re more up to speed on the particulars of the pensions enjoyed by government employees than we are about bonuses and bailouts in the banking industry and we’ve been tricked, willingly for the most part, into confusing the most benign rules being imposed on health insurance companies with full-blown Communism. Would we be in the same place had Al Gore been sworn in on a frigid January morning in 2001? Were the realities of 2011 inevitable back in November of 2000? I don’t know, of course, but I have fantasies about asking my former neighbors their opinion on that, now that we’ve all had more than a decade to reflect.

That conversation has to remain in the realm of fantasy for now. Between the election and the day I moved out of my apartment in September 2002, I made a point of saying “Yay Bush!” every time I saw any of my neighbors, and by the time I moved most of them would barely make eye contact with me, never mind say goodbye or wish me well. But this conversation – the one I’m having with myself and, if you’re reading, with you – does not have to wait at all.

Recently, I have had glimpses into what I consider a vision from hell: It’s November of 2012 and the spotlights are on Southeast Portland and the people have spoken and it’s not looking so good for Barack Obama. Do I blame the Green Party for Gore’s loss in 2000? I sure do. When there are two leading candidates in a race, one leaning in one direction and one in the other, and then a third candidate enters who leans more in the same general direction as one of the original two than the other, that automatically and usually irrevocably strengthens the position of the candidate who leans in the opposite direction. Ralph Nader didn't give W. more votes; he simply gave him a larger lead. Is it fair to blame the Green Party for splitting the vote in 2000? I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t think simple math is fair or unfair. If you’re looking for fair, ask Mommy to fluff the pillows.

The biggest challenge I have with the Green Party (and the Tea Party, for that matter) is that I cannot condemn it outright. That’s because I think a lot of the ideas are great. I could get behind many of the initiatives because I do believe that if we destroy the earth, something we’re making excellent progress on as far as I can tell, the rest of it doesn’t really matter because it’ll all be over.

What concerns me about the Green Party is the people. My opinion is influenced, of course, by the fact that I live in Portland, which is to the Green Party what New York is to the bankers. The people in this party strike me as overwhelmingly white, middle class, privileged, spoiled and, worst of all, lazy. They want a grass roots president but they cannot be bothered to learn about the government in their own community. They want to end our dependence on fossil fuels, as do I, but when it’s time to learn about the billions – if not trillions – of dollars that are invested in ensuring that that dependence continues, forget about it. They take the same approach to healthcare. They are suburban teenagers challenging their parents on curfew hours. They want it their way, right now, right here, no exceptions.

In fairness, the Tea Party operates on the same premise as far as I can tell. Unlike the Green Party, though, the Tea Party at least shows up at events, including elections. Where was the Green Party last November? At bikram yoga? Schlepping back and forth between Whole Foods and New Seasons in search of fresh, “locally sourced” organic produce that you have to be at least slightly special to afford regularly? Maybe they felt too disenfranchised this time around, too alienated to show up at the polls, which, in Oregon, is any place – including the toilet seat – where you’re able to make marks on a piece of paper with a No. 2 pencil. So again, true to the recurring nightmare that is the Green Party, people who are so “passionate” about reconfiguring the entire society in one clean sweep are for some reason incapable of accomplishing the most simple of tasks – voting in Oregon.

And they want to run the country? Speaking of Mommy, what I’m about to say makes me almost grateful that my own is deceased, because she’d kick my ass from one end of Saint Louis County to the next if she read what I’m about to write: I think I’d rather have W.

Though I’ve never put them in writing, I’ve shared my opinions on the Green Party before, and most people immediately assume that I’m a conservative, which is quite telling, I think: If you don’t agree with our platform and pledge allegiance to it, they seem to be saying, you must be a Republican. I just refuse to toss my vote around like candy at a parade. I cannot and I will not fill out a ballot in support of people who are proud of the fact that they have zero ability to see issues in a context that extends beyond their immediate wish list. In this country, today is the result of more than 230 years of other days, of other agendas bought and paid for in any number of ways for any number of reasons. To me, the Green Party’s approach to the centuries seems to be to wipe them clean as if they were nothing more than markings on a chalk board. It’s not an idea without appeal, but I think it’s lazy.

So back to the radio show. Toward the end of the hour a woman called in with what I think was a great question. The people who have the money aren’t going to simply hand it over, she said. The country has been built around making sure they retain the cash, and the power that goes with it, so what did David Cobb think we should do, not next November, but right now, today. Well, the hostess said, let me just jump in here. And jump she did, even though the question was clearly not directed at her. What we should do is pull out of both wars immediately and use all that money for public education. That’s what we should do, she said, that’s what must be done.

Okay.

My most glaring imperfection

Like many people I know, I strive for an existence that is completely free of bigotry. To me, bigotry works like this. You take a characteristic, real or imagined, of a broad group of people and give yourself permission to apply those characteristics to individuals. For example, the gays, as we all know, are horribly promiscuous. Therefore, since I’m a gay, I must whore around a lot. All I can say to that is, I wish.

In terms of rejecting bigotry, I give myself a solid B. I do fairly well, although I am far from perfect, and today I want to talk about my most glaring imperfection: Mormons. I have searched far and wide, high and low, looking, desperately at times, for exceptions, for evidence that my opinion of Mormons is informed by nothing more legitimate than pure ignorance. But so far, every detail I uncover about Mormons is unsavory.

Another aspect of bigotry that’s strange is that there’s a certain symmetry to it. The projector usually has quite a bit in common with the receiver. From what I’ve read, Hitler had some Jewish heritage tucked away in his closet. So before I delve into what I do not like about Mormons, an acknowledgement: On paper, it would not be hard to mistake the Mormons for the Catholics. Both corporations loathe women. In spite of the fact that both function as pretty fancy romp rooms for repressed homos, both put a lot of time and money into fueling the systemic degradation of gay people. They both train their young – their very young – in the art of shunning those who do not adhere. Under a cloak of “missionary work,” both want to extend their institution’s global footprint as far and wide as possible, and the poorer the country, the better. (The Catholics do have a slight edge on that one, though, since the Mormons have yet to issue forth anyone worthy of being called their version of Mother Teresa.) Both love to inflict their twisted shit on as many people as possible via edicts and policies and so on and so forth and then, when anyone objects, immediately and fervently assume the victim position. Both are hopelessly inward; having stripped their followers of critical thinking capabilities, Catholics and Mormons alike are often left with no choice but to turn to their organization’s authority figures, who instruct them, via God, I presume, how to feel about various issues of the day.

And that’s where it gets warped, in my opinion. If God did indeed create all of us, he or she appears to have equipped us with the ability to reason, the ability to make decisions that contribute, in ways large and small, to our survival, which in turn contributes to our ability to procreate and carry the species forward into the future.

In a way that’s deliciously, ironically anti-God, independent thinking – certainly God’s greatest gift – is as welcome in the cathedrals and the temples as fireworks are on airplanes.

Reason, critical thinking, survival instincts – those are just three of the things that our Catholic and Mormon friends don’t believe in, and as a result there are millions upon millions of people roaming about who are too stupid, too scared or too lazy to decide how they feel about having or not having children, and when, or when not, about two women getting married, about who’s running for school board next year, about whether or not it’s okay for someone to decline life support beyond a certain point of deterioration. These are basic, basic considerations, and yet flocks of the devoted run to the father figure for guidance, and that guidance – at least when it’s put forth by Mormons and Catholics – for some reason warrants headlines around the world.

When it comes to imbibing offensiveness with arrogance, the Mormons outdo the Catholics in two critical areas. The first is Utah, which they appear to own outright. Sadly, it’s one of the most beautiful places in this country. You could say the same of the Catholics and Italy, I suppose, but I think a lot of that country’s beauty is human made, and you’ve got to give it up for the Catholics for their exquisite taste in art, even if a lot of it is stolen. And second, the business of converting the dead. I try to be polite at all times, even to those who deserve anything but, but if there are any Mormons reading this, keep your greedy fucking hands off my grandmother. (I left the polygamy off my list because it’s caricature material and best left to the cartoonists.)

So given my bigotry toward the Mormon enterprise, you will surely understand how watching cable television last week forced me – though willingly, at times – down a slippery slope. Someone on MSNBC was trashing Mike Huckabee up one side and down the other, which is always good fun. As it almost always does, gay marriage came up. Mike Huckabee is against it because he thinks it might lead to polygamy. Only that’s not really what he’s saying, according to the jabberer on MSNBC; what he was really saying is that he still hates Mitt Romney, a Mormon (how that happened in Massachusetts continues to confound me) and he will seize any opportunity that comes his way to slam him by taking pot shots at the Mormons. Good for him, I thought. Finally, something to like about Mike Huckabee. Even though he was using gay marriage as a springboard – although really, why not? – I found myself … applauding for Mike Huckabee. Even as he’s throwing my tribe right off the cliff. All of which proved to me, yet again, the pure power of bigotry.

The big moment

Because I am superstitious and because I mistrust anyone who is paid, quite well I’d imagine, to sit in front of a camera and explain the workings of the world to the masses, I shivered a bit when Rachel Maddow declared the labor dispute in Wisconsin over. The Republicans, said she, who, led by their governor, were trying to strip unions of state employees of their right to bargain collectively, had lost. The moment of victory, according to Rachel Maddow, was the legislator being wrestled to the ground by security guards as he tried to enter the state capitol building to retrieve personal belongings from his office, all of which was caught, of course, on video. Furthermore, according to Rachel Maddow, this loss in Wisconsin is but the beginning: The Republicans bit off more than they could chew in the 2010 mid-term elections, and for that they will pay dearly in 2012.

I’d never watched Rachel Maddow until this week, when I had access to hundreds of cable television channels, and I was completely underwhelmed by her. She struck me as quite similar to conservative commentators in that her priority does not seem to be getting it right: She seems to be more interested in getting it first.

I don’t know if she declared the dispute over first or not, but I do know that she was wrong. Quite wrong, in fact. Because by the middle of the week, the Republicans got resourceful with the rules and regulations. They scrubbed the bill upheld by the absence of Democratic legislators clean of its numerical content – which, conveniently, nullified the quorum requirement – and then voted to strip the state unions of their right to collective bargaining. In less than 20 minutes, decades of small victories won by people who are niether wealthy nor powerful were thrown right out the window. So much for Rachel Maddow’s smug “game over.”

So I guess I didn’t get off to a great start with Rachel Maddow. Small loss, because regardless of the political slant, regardless of whether or not I’ve ever seen the person in question, I think there’s something fundamentally suspect about the television crowd. They make too much money, and their focus, understandably, seems to be on the delivery rather than the substance. For the sake of comparison, I watched Bill O’Reilly for the first time last week as well. In terms of tone and the general willingness to muddy key aspects of opposing arguments with glib generalities, I don’t think there’s a lot of difference between the two.

Anyhow, speaking of off-base predictions, another aspect of the news from Wisconsin that made me really nervous was the arrival of Michael Moore, a phenomenon that is never subtle. Personally, I have never been asked by the leaders of a dispute to coordinate the summoning to town of national figures, but if I were, there are two individuals who would never make it onto my short list. The first is Al Sharpton.

As for the second, I don’t know if Michael Moore’s denying that there is a financial crisis in the U.S., and in Wisconsin, could have been more lethal if he’d loaded the rifles himself and then handed them to anti-union Republicans right before next year’s election. What’s funny about that is that I am convinced that the recession is in large part a PR stunt orchestrated and executed by the financial industry. But saying that in the midst of the Wisconsin dispute is just plain stupid. I can already hear how Michael Moore’s words will be used to win the votes of people who are truly struggling: Look at these liberals. They don’t care about your situation. You don’t matter to them. They’re ignoring your plight because they think they’re better than you.

And Rachel Maddow is announcing to her millions of viewers that Republicans will “pay dearly” in 2012? Please.

Michael Moore sucked up a lot of time on Democracy Now, a radio program on which he made one breathy, emotionally amped statement after another. One thing that caught my attention, and not in a good way, was his assertion that the Republicans will “get their comeuppance” for this vote. I wondered if he and Rachel Maddow had compared notes before opening their mouths, or if they were feeding off one another. Or maybe they just have access to data that I don’t, because as far as I can see we cannot grasp the concept that if everyone cancelled a credit card or two, the bankers and other assorted thieves who put a pretty decent dent in the worldwide economy would be brought to their knees, and quickly, so why anyone would think that what happened in Wisconsin will influence voters at any point further into the future than next month is beyond me.

He was just getting warmed up: This, Michael Moore said urgently, right here and right now, in Wisconsin, is … the … moment. I sipped my coffee and turned the page in my magazine. The moment for what? As if reading my mind, he went on: It’s time for us to rush out of our houses and join in solidarity with the people in Wisconsin and show everyone that we’re not going to take it anymore. Personally, I’m not holding my breath. There are far too many celebrity meltdowns running simultaneously at the moment. Plus, gas prices are on the rise. As far as I can tell, the only thing going anywhere is the story itself, which has rushed right off of page one and was, as of yesterday, stuck in the middle of the front section.

Anyhow, the strangest thing I heard Michael Moore say involved the couch. Actually, it wasn’t what he said that was strange, it was the way I reacted to it. In the midst of all the talk about the importance of the moment, the comeuppance that’s on the way and many other things, Michael Moore – Michael Moore – said, “It’s time to get up off the couch.” I cannot listen to him say that and take it seriously. I know I’m being petty, and catty and a few other things, but the image of Michael Moore getting up off my couch to rush anywhere is a picture that makes it difficult for me to stop laughing.

International Women's Day 2011

This week two of my neighbors are out of town, so I’m doing a bit of house sitting, dog sitting and teenager sitting. In addition to two dogs, a freezer full of food and one amicable teenager, the house has several remote controls and hundreds of cable television channels. So in addition to the other sitting duties, I’ve been sitting on my ass and watching and listening. A lot.

Though easily missed, March is Women’s History Month. This honoring, if it can be called that, of the gender characteristics that define more than one half of the world’s population, is an outgrowth of International Women’s Day, which is March 8 and was originally called International Working Women’s Day. The first observance of the day took place in 1911, making this the 100th anniversary.

I was kind of surprised that there wasn’t a bit more fanfare over it, considering the century angle and all, but then I spent a couple of evenings glued to cable television and was reminded, yet again, of something I’ve known for quite some time but that came to me – as it always does – with all the subtlety of a glass of ice water thrown in my face.

We hate women.

It’s not enough that many heterosexual wedding ceremonies still begin with the father “giving” the daughter away. The salary inequities aren’t enough, nor are the rape statistics. The blatant gender-based discrimination normalized by tax-exempt, global corporations with a religious bent is not enough. It is not enough that the mindless mobs of people blinded by a deadly mixture of zeal and fury have been allowed to metastasize throughout the most fundamental sphere of the human experience – the vocabulary, the narrative – by a gift from the media, which insists upon using the term “pro life” when there could not be two words that more honorably mask the true nature of that particular movement. And it’s not enough that we cannot manage to amend the U.S. Constitution to confirm that which should never require confirmation: Women and men are equal. It’s too controversial.

Since none of that is enough, there is cable television, where in a single hour on Thursday night I witnessed Wendy Williams asking Aretha Franklin, repeatedly, if she, as “the queen,” feels threatened by any other women in the music business (she does not), Joan Rivers and three of her giggly sidekicks (two female, one not) trashing female celebrities by the dozen for what they wore to various events, the new wife of a professional basketball player in New York being practically begged to “smack talk” the wives of other players – Have they said hello to you? Have they invited you to sit with them during the games? – a preview of an upcoming show about a woman named Holly who, in the clip, calls another woman a bitch and throws a tray of drinks in her face, LaToya Jackson gurgling and purring about her run-in with Star Jones on Donald Trump’s show, Kathy Bates’ confession to Joy someone or another that she didn’t “go public” with her ovarian cancer because she feared it would jeopardize her ability to land roles, one of the Kardashian people being booed by a studio audience because her new and improved bosom takes up too much room in a photo, the relentlessly faggy presenters on E! standing around with smirks on their faces as they regale the camera with one tale after another about female celebrities in sordid situations and, finally, a group of women from the show where they all compete to marry the same guy appear on a stage together to talk about the experience but end up hurling insults at one another regarding, among other things, the way one of them cared for her child, or did not, during the show’s filming.

For me, that was the beginning of the end. In traditional family situations, the father steps in to restore a kinder, wiser brand of order. In office situations, it is more often than not the male employees who are looked to for guidance on critical matters. They are insightful, they are decisive, they are leaders. And the women, as conventional wisdom dictates, are catty, petty and prone to gossip, so much so that saying, quite clearly, that you strongly prefer a male boss and male colleagues will barely raise an eyebrow. Just for fun, replace the word ‘woman’ with the word ‘black’ in any statement about the pitfalls of the archetypal female boss, then say the words out loud.

On cable television, as in real life, a penis was needed to calm the storm brewing among the beautiful women who had competed to marry the same man. The blandly attractive host of the program raised his right hand as if he were signaling a car to not enter the intersection. Such grace, such poise, as the utterly helpless gold diggers gave it their all to throw verbal gasoline on the fire that was, of course, the contender whose parenting skills were under scrutiny. And even though his wisdom was conveyed in the simplest of ways – he said “Really?” and then, once again, but not as a question, “Really” – the effect, as it often is when a male pulls rank on a group of females, was profound.

IQ

I’m watching Six Feet Under, and between each season I have three or four movies tucked in on my Netflix queue like little thematic separators. One of the movies between the third and fourth season of Six Feet Under was Shakes the Clown. It’s as bad as it sounds, and I recommend it wholeheartedly, if only for the joy you will experience when you hear LaWanda Page – Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son – explain her “peanut butter pussy.” I also watched Idiocracy, a horrifying little tale about rapidly declining IQ scores as told through two people involved in an Army experiment run amok. While the movie takes place somewhere around the year 2500, it didn’t require that much of a stretch of the imagination. People drive en masse off crumbled bridges because observation is a long-lost art form, there are cable networks dedicated exclusively to masturbation and the president of the United States has to remind the country, during his inaugural address, that “reading books isn’t just for fags … neither is writing!”

So I started thinking about Sanford and Son, and Redd Foxx and LaWanda Page – two of Saint Louis’ finest – and All in the Family and Roseanne and a few other shows, and I started wondering if it’s a symptom of declining IQs – in real life, not in a movie – that a show about three white, male characters who are nothing more than unimaginative mouthpieces for the most tired, unoriginal gender jokes is the most popular program on the air. Were the 1970s really that long ago? Or are we just really good at lowering our standards quickly? Then I started wondering about the actor with the lead role on the sitcom. I’d done my best to ignore the story, which was easier than it may seem. I have not watched the Today show for a while, and in the evenings, instead of subjecting myself to the stupidity of Katie Couric I’ve been reading Thomas Hardy for my book group – I’m a fag! – and waiting until 7:00 to turn the television on. That’s when Jim Lehrer steps in and demonstrates that “we are not in the entertainment business” is not a talking point but a policy.

On Thursday morning a friend of mine pointed out that the television star seems to have entered the manic phase of his descent into the bleakest pits of mental illness. Which was interesting because my main source of information on the spectacle was, up until then, Facebook, where there have been pictures and video clips and comments galore and quotes that concluded with a question: Is this Muammar Gaddifi speaking or is it …? And then the news that this particular television star is breaking records for the most followers on Twitter, which inspired me to come up with a new tag line for that particularly odious technological invasion: Twitter: Now We Can All Be Stupid. So I posted a little Facebook status update on Friday morning, something I rarely do, expressing my shock that mental illness, alcoholism, child abuse and domestic violence appear to have become spectator sports. And the first comment was from a most successful PR woman asking me if someone was camped out in my front yard again. Isn’t that funny? There is a certain type of person who laughs, really laughs, when someone trips and falls in public. There are people who think it’s funny, and those people have always, up until now, struck me as mean spirited. Now, they seem almost civil.

Another unusual thing happened recently: It snowed in Portland. In late February. When it comes to snow accumulation, I just rely on sex logic: I don’t get worked up over anything less than five inches. Not so at Portland Public Schools, which cancelled classes, or at KGW, which preempted bad network programming for worse extended storm coverage. After the snow, it got really cold, so there were some slick roads, and that’s when I started wondering about the amount of direction passed along to the general public for situations and circumstances that should not, in my opinion, be too difficult to manage. Be careful when you drive. Give yourself some extra time to get where you’re going, meaning, if it took you 20 minutes to drive to work yesterday, it might take you 40 minutes today … even if you take the exact same route. Be careful when you walk. Try not to slam on the brakes. If you’re on a bike avoid making sharp turns. If you’ve already put delicate plants in the ground, cover them. Wear your mittens, and if your window is open, close it.

Do we need to be told, over and over again, that driving on a dry road is a fundamentally different experience than driving on a road – even if it’s the same road – that has snow on it? Does my 13-year-old niece need to be told five times, in January, in Missouri, to put her shoes on? Is the collective IQ already stuck in an irreversible decline?

One of the best things about Portland, I think, is the public transportation system. We’re amateurs compared to the cities in other countries where I’ve spent time, but in the U.S., with the possible exception of New York and Washington, I think we’re at the top of the list.

And one of the best parts of our public transit system, I think, is the fact that each bus is equipped with a wheelchair ramp. When a person in a wheelchair needs to board the bus, the driver has to activate the ramp, which emerges from the floor right between the driver’s seat and the front entrance to the bus. The ramp – a platform – then extends out and gradually declines to the ground, creating a bridge between the sidewalk and the bus.

And that’s when it gets tricky. When the ramp is being extended or pulled back in, it is physically impossible to walk on or off the bus via the front door. There are bright yellow arrows painted on the ceilings of most Tri-Met buses. The arrows point to the rear doors, which are located, if you measure from the front, about 2/3 of the way back. The aisles on a Tri-Met bus are wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs; they are not wide enough to accommodate two-way traffic when one of those ways is occupied by a wheelchair. When a wheelchair is entering or exiting the bus there is not room for other passengers to walk, sit or stand in the section of the aisle between the front entrance and the place where the person in the wheelchair will be seated. The reason the area in front of the rear entrance is painted bright yellow, and the reason there are signs that say DO NOT STAND HERE is that it’s an exit, not an area to stand in while the bus is moving. In three languages, written from back to front, which is the direction you’d read in if you were standing in the aisle facing the front, are the words: Go With The Flow. I think the reason the arrow points to the back is to illustrate – illustrate, meaning to make a point with a picture – the principle that it’s much smoother for everyone if, when people are …

What I do at this point is visualize. I visualize rocks worn smooth and shiny by millions of years of rushing water. I visualize pale blue sheets hanging on clotheslines on a sunny but cool afternoon in early April. I visualize 6:00 in the morning in the depths of January: just-brewed coffee in a big white mug, a soft lamp, night-black windows. The reason I visualize rather than respond is that I honestly cannot trust myself when I hear bus drivers beginning to explain that which should never have to be explained, or even mentioned. And so far, I’ve yet to witness the explanation taking hold in the mind of the recipient on the first telling.

Busy people

A month or so ago I realized that my general disdain for PR people did not take hold when I started working at an agency in 2000. It started in the fall of 1984, when I was a freshman at a little liberal arts college that most people have never heard of. The only part of this college that was remotely well known, in very specific circles, was the theater department. And the theater majors, a group of people I hadn’t thought about for many years until last month, knew it, and they made sure that everyone else knew it as well. They were special. They were talented. Most importantly, they were busy.

I hate that word. The instant I hear it, my insides begin to ache.

Even in 1984, without the computers and the cell phones and Facebook and instant messaging and all the rest of it, the theater people had it down, and for that, in my own little way, I salute them. When they went to student council meetings to request funding, they needed to be at the top of the agenda because they were busy. For some reason, close to half the students in the first linguistics class I took were theater majors, who were adored by the professor, who was a nun who called herself “Deb” (whether that was her birth name or her nun name I couldn’t say – we were not close.) Getting the study groups scheduled could have been a nightmare had it not been for Deb’s understanding of the hardships of being a theater major. “Let’s remember to schedule around rehearsals for our thespian friends,” she said. “They’re quite busy this semester.” The theater majors bitched and moaned endlessly about the reviews published in the student newspaper. The reviews, they said, many times, were inaccurate. So, when I became the editor my senior year, I was pretty proud of myself for tackling that problem head on: Theater majors, provided they weren’t involved in the production being reviewed, would write the theater reviews. They knew the finer points of theater, after all, better than anyone else. A perfect solution, I thought, except for the one factor I hadn’t considered: They were too busy.

The people from the food co-op committee also have some skills when it comes to being busy. Although they’re not very slick people generally, they too are quite busy. A couple of them – who would make great PR people, come to think of it, were it not for a few appearance-related challenges – routinely say they’re too busy to do one thing or another, but then proceed to do it (because nobody else is capable, presumably) but do it incorrectly, or incompletely, or both. That’s followed by more mail, and more endless discussion at meetings. The worst person in that group, a woman who creates more inefficiency than anyone I’ve ever known, actually introduced herself at the first general meeting by telling an auditorium full of people that she was far too busy to get involved. But then, unfortunately, she did. Another sends e-mails so tedious they numb the soul. After a sentence or two (or three) about how “insane” things are at her office, she launches into paragraph after paragraph of pure pointlessness. Then she sets the mail to “High Importance,” and ends the mail – finally, mercifully – with some inane quip about honeybees, then her name and then “(at work).” She’s that busy!

PR, though, is different. The industry is based in large part on the art of taking something fairly standard – a computer, for example, or the ability to talk to someone on the telephone – and transforming it into a star-spangled spectacle so bright that it eclipses everything and anything that came before it. So I forgive myself for forgetting, for more than a decade, about the theater majors. The PR teams I worked with reinvented the concept of busy by taking it to an entirely new level, and I was so impressed I accidentally scrubbed my memory.

PR people – especially those who specialize in technology – are busy at all hours. E-mails are sent round the world at 3:00 in the morning. Facebook pages are updated shortly after midnight with ponderings about who is working on what. My personal favorite in that category: A rising PR superstar responded to someone’s status update in the dead of night with “can’t sleep … busy thinking about launch.” Isn’t that sad? PR people sit in meetings and talk about how busy they are. PR people are often too busy to go to lunch. PR people often begin their e-mail messages with a rambling comment or two about how busy they are, but hey, even though they’re busy they want to “touch base” or “circle back” with whomever they’re writing to, so they’re making time to “reach out” in e-mail. Whew!

Snow is such a fact of life in Alaska that there are many words to describe it; and in PR there are several ways to convey the fact that you’re busy. Sometimes you’re slammed. Sometimes you’re pulled in a thousand different directions, which can be abbreviated with “I’m really pulled today.” My all-time favorite, though, is this: heads down. My former manager once wrote me an e-mail that said, “I can’t meet with you today because I’m pretty heads down.” Like wine, that one just gets better (or worse) with time. Some would call this polishing a turd, or putting lipstick on a pig, but for me it’s a great example of word power: two words – heads down – become, without even breaking a sweat, three: dumb, dumber, dumbest.

But here’s where the PR people really distinguish themselves in the arena of busy. They power up their computers (hopefully earlier than anyone else) and then sign into their instant messenger program. Then they go into the control panel of their instant messenger system and change their status to, you guessed it, Busy. So when the rest of us start our workday and sign in to our instant messenger program, we are greeted with: Jane Smith is Busy. Although I’ve said this a thousand times, and even though it would be obvious to any reasonably alert first grader, here, once again, is my opinion: If you have time to screw around with an instant messenger status setting, you are, by definition, not busy.

An apology to Tavis Smiley

I have made some assumptions about Tavis Smiley and his show, many of which are not good. As I explain this, imagine a family tree. On the top row, sitting in solitary splendor, is Oprah. Since the only thing bigger than her mouth and her ego is her ass, there is no room for anyone else. So below her, connected via a solid, bold-faced line, is Charlie Rose, who is dying to take her place in the national hallucination (he’s all but there, I think). Then off to one side of Charlie Rose, slightly lower – but only slightly – is Tavis Smiley. The line that connects him to each of the other two is not solid, or bold: It’s dotted. Tavis Smiley, I think, wants to be the black Charlie Rose and, at the same time, the male Oprah. It’s quite a tightrope.

On Thursday night my perception of him was shattered, so today I am being a good person and writing an apology to Tavis Smiley.

I was in the midst of my nightly tea ritual, pouring just-boiled water into my favorite mug while, in the living room, Tavis Smiley was yakkety-yakking with Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who I ignored until last week. He “hasn’t ruled out” going after the Republican nomination next year and has just published a book. The title of the book is either Simple Government or something very close to it. I’m not going to spend time looking it up because the title, in my opinion, tells me all I need to know. We live in country with 330 million people who represent a number of ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, economic, political, sexual, marital and nutritional situations, inclinations and ramifications. We live in a world that is transforming before our very eyes more quickly than even our greed can destroy its best features. So let’s dumb it down, amp up the folksiness to the point where it’s deafening and keep it simple? I think taking a third-grade approach to infinitely complex issues and challenges in adherence to this “Joe the Plumber” stupidness isn’t just wrong, it’s arrogantly irresponsible. On the other hand, there are 12 “ideas” for this simplification, so maybe it’s a recovery manifesto in disguise.

The first thing that caught my ear was when Tavis Smiley told Mike Huckabee that he always enjoys interviewing him – that’s the Charlie Rose influence at work – and that he considers him a friend. But with all due respect …

Like most Republicans, Mike Huckabee thinks the government is too big. Great, but don’t lots of Republican governors say that and then accept federal money? Why yes, Mike Huckabee said, they do, but it was theirs to begin with, and it’s theirs to spend as they see fit because the states should have at least as much – if not more – of a say as “the government” does. Oh hang the hell on, Tavis Smiley said (not exactly in those words, but close). The Smiley family has, on occasion, been on the receiving end of states’ rights legislation in a few Southern states, and the experience was, according to even the most conservative history books, anything but liberating. At times, the states’ rights line of thinking permitted entire branches to be sawed off the Tavis family tree and sold; at other times they were just lynched.

Then, Ronald Regan. Finally, finally someone on television spoke up about the national adoration of the man who allowed thousands of homos to die without saying a word, the man who demonized and debilitated the public sector like no other has before or since (so far), the man who did the heavy lifting toward today’s rabid, thoughtless anti-union mindset, the man who managed to have mental illness reclassified as a crime, the man who nearly destroyed my parents’ marriage, and it was Tavis Smiley. All this uproar over the 100th anniversary of Reagan’s birth, Tavis Smiley said, with disgust in his voice. You guys have made him into some kind of Messiah. (Messiah was his word, not mine, though I couldn’t have thought of a better one had I tried.)

Finally, a phrase I thought had disappeared with Dan Quayle: family values. Tavis Smiley pointed out – quite well, I think – that there are families, and there are values, and then there are family values, a term that inevitably leads to trouble because, in spite of the beauty of simplicity, there are lots of differing opinions out there, lots of different families, if you will, and lots of different values.

And here’s what scares me about Mike Huckabee: he was able to talk through every single point that came up, without losing, for even a second, that sickening, slightly upside-down smile smeared across his pudgy little face, a smile and a face that would work as well behind a pulpit somewhere (anywhere) in Arkansas as it would telling lies from behind a dented metal desk in a pre-fab building off to one side of a muddy used car lot also, preferably, in Arkansas.

The racist violence that used to pass for “due process” in places like Arkansas? No worries! There are “higher laws” and there are “natural laws” and we can all take comfort in them.

Worshipping Ronald Regan? It’s about the spirit of the man, Mike Huckabee said, it’s about the optimism, the faith in the future. Air traffic controllers? People with schizophrenia sleeping in dank stairwells and desperate alleys four blocks from the U.S. Capitol? Whatever!

And family values? Well, Mike Huckabee knows there are a lot of different kinds of families doing their best all across the land. Why, his wife was raised by a single mother, and they had a rough go of it, but she’s a wonderful woman, so clearly they managed. But, Mike Huckabee said in a tone so preacherly I shivered a bit in spite of my cup of steaming tea, we all know that the best way for a child to grow up is with both parents, one father and one mother.

How and why, I wondered, is Mike Huckabee so certain that that’s the best way for a child to be raised? Tavis Smiley, after asking questions in a way I wish more television people would, ran out of time. I, on the other hand, did not, and I have two possible answers. The first is that Mike Huckabee is so white, and so male and so Christian that he takes it on faith that anyone who doesn’t aspire to what he is, and who does not want what he has, is a degenerate on whose behalf we need to intervene. The second is that he is so white, and so male and so Christian that he doesn’t really need to explain his views, because simply – very, very simply – articulating them is all that’s required of him.