Donald and Sarah in
my mother’s living room
by David Benjamin
MADISON Wis. — I couldn’t help it. There on TV, broadcast from somewhere in darkest, dimmest Iowa, was the second coming of Sarah Palin, riffing and jiving, flapping her arms, cackling at her own jokes and speaking fluent bumper-sticker — while Donald Trump stood by, surreally silent and wearing an embalmed-corpse grin.
As
I watched the Palin/Trump tag team, I couldn’t help recalling my evil
stepfather, Randy, who might well have been their spiritual mentor.
Randy
was a mean drunk. For the first decade or so of his symbiosis with my
mother, Randy was always drunk, and always talking, always — by his
insistence — the center of attention. When alcoholic rot finally forced
him to stop drinking, he revealed himself to be the identical horse’s
ass that he’d been when he was perpetually polluted. He gave sobriety a
bad name.
As Randy turned out, his problem wasn’t booze. It was
Randy, a human cesspool of bitterness, nameless recriminations, seething
bigotry, misanthropy, misogyny and political nihilism. Every minute of
every day, Randy foresaw the collapse of civilization beneath a swarthy
horde of barbarians eating welfare caviar and driving pimpmobile
Cadillacs. Randy loved America, mainly because he was American. Randy
despised America, because it let too many other people be Americans.
But Randy’s hatred wasn’t strictly a matter of nationalistm. It was universal and ecumenical.
Entering
a room where Randy lurked, sunk into an easy chair and scowling at the
TV, was like finding yourself in a locked room with an abused Doberman.
Though he might seem quiescent for a moment, you could depend on him to
commence foaming through his lips and baring his fangs.
Randy’s
rage had no rational source. By surviving World War II untouched, he’d
earned a free Bachelor’s Degree on the GI Bill, plus cheap beer at the
VFW. He was a tenured manager in a generous company, with a pension plan
and free health care. He had an inexplicably loyal wife and a couple of
nice kids by a previous marriage (not to mention three stepchildren who
couldn’t stand him). He had money in the bank, a regular stool at his
favorite bar, a big house in a nice neighborhood in a beautiful city, a
late-model car and Mom to drive him around after the DMV took away his
license. Despite himself, Randy had a piece of the American dream.
And he hated it.
An
encounter with Randy typically began with an offhand remark that was
outrageous, usually bigoted, always angry and visceral, and entirely
devoid of reason, foundation or temperance. He was setting you up.
Respond politely or hold your tongue and he would escalate, with a
comment even more vicious and preposterous, daring you to talk back,
raising your blood pressure, teasing out your indignation. He would keep
up the flow of venom, slurring, spewing and slandering until — “JESUS
CHRIST, RANDY!” — you’d snap. Everybody, eventually, snapped. Ghandi
would have cracked. Martin Luther King would have resorted to violence.
The Dalai Lama would have forsaken the lotus position to kick Randy in
the nuts.
Once empowered by your anger, Randy owned you. He got
personal, slinging insults, disparaging your character, brains and
looks, your manhood, your worthiness to occupy space on the planet. He
sneered, sputtered, muttered and upchucked a barrage of provocations so
unjust and scurrilous that you began scanning the room for a blunt
object heavy enough to obliterate his face and drive his teeth into his
spinal cord.
Rather than that, you just fled, as fast and far as
possible. I stopped visiting my mother, for 25 years, while Randy was in
her house. The Elks Club, a sort of local refuge for obnoxious drunks,
wearied of his act, refused him service and told him never to come back.
So,
last week, I listened to Sarah’s dipsoid stream-of-consciousness in
Iowa. I watched Donald waiting itchily for his turn to roar. And I
thought of Randy. Couldn’t help it.
He would have loved these two.
Palin
and Trump — like Randy — are geysers of inchoate grievance, erupting at
predictable intervals to scald and inflame every living thing within
range of their voices. Like Randy, they see a world that has betrayed
them personally and dashed every cherished hope for every white
Christian. Like Randy, Palin and Trump know whom to blame for America’s
cowardly descent into a mongrel-breeding hellhole and a landfill for the
scum of the earth.
And they’ll tell you. Over and over again.
At the top of their lungs. ’Til you’re ready to tear your hair and run
screaming from the room.
But here’s the part that momentarily had
me puzzled. Nobody was fleeing that stadium in Iowa. Crowds were
cheering. What’s wrong with these people?
But I think I’ve
figured it out. Yes, Palin and Trump are the apotheosis of the obnoxious
drunk. From a safe distance, however, a blowhard with a snootful can be
strangely amusing. His rants, raves, calumnies, dark fantasies and free
associations have a certain sideshow charm. And sure enough, now and
then — like the proverbial infinite number of monkeys — the obnoxious
drunk will say something you wish you’d said (if only you weren’t
sober).
But as the gap shrinks between you and that bitter,
overbearing, racist rummy, the less fun he seems. You stop laughing and
you inch toward the exit.
I know. Trump’s not a drunk. He just
acts like one, crying in his beer, blaming others for our troubles,
pretending that he’s bigger, better, smarter, richer than he really is.
Donald lets the booze do his talking without any booze. He gives
sobriety a bad name.
Meanwhile, he’s getting closer. Closer to
winning a primary or two, closer to nomination, closer to the White
House. Closer to being right there, with you and me, in Mom’s living
room, all the time, with no way out.
And he just won’t shut up.
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
The Weekly Screed (#754)
A high-tech solution
to the battle over Roe v. Wade
by David Benjamin
MADISON Wis. — Visitors to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, had a thousand reason to be distracted. They were buzzed by drones, dazzled by chrome-crusted cars that run (without a driver) on everything from Wesson Oil to isotopes, and hypnotized by wide-screen ultra-definition, four-dimensional TV with sound so piercing that no bodily orifice was safe.
I was there. I saw all this stuff. So I understand how 180,000 conventioneers managed to overlook perhaps the most politically significant high-tech breakthrough of this — or any — decade. The brainchild of a small Texas startup called Ayudi Solutions, a tiny gadget cunningly called Robo-Bort 3000 poses the potential to end America’s long, divisive debate over abortion rights and contraception.
To illustrate the genius of this amazing device, Dr. Fallopia Crenshaw, Ayudi’s CEO, held out a handful of raw arborio rice and said, “Go ahead. Find Robbie.”
(“Robbie” is Ayudi’s copyrighted nickname for the Robo-Bort prototype.)
Picking out this minuscule medical miracle from the rice grains proved impossible because “Robbie” is virtually indistinguishable in both size and color.
But what does it do?
“Right now, if I were to set Robbie loose,” said Dr. Crenshaw, “it would perform a perfectly safe, 100-percent infallible, painless abortion in a span of roughly 30 minutes, on a fertilized human egg as far as six weeks into gestation. And all this happens in the home, with no need to visit a clinic, without the intervention of any medical professional, while the consumer rests comfortably, reading a magazine or watching ‘Oprah.’ And she doesn’t feel a thing.”
I frankly found this claim astounding and insisted on more details about the Robo-Bort technology.
Happy to comply, Dr. Crenshaw gripped the infinitesimal gadget gingerly with a tweezers and placed it beneath a microscope. Revealed there, under 400-percent magnification, was a fully articulated advanced-tactical combat vehicle painted for intra-uterine camouflage, with tank treads and a formidable cannon-like tube protruding from its tiny turret.
“What we’ve created, through microtechnology advances unique to Ayudi Solutions, is an itty-bitty variation on the U.S. Army’s famous Abrams Fighting Vehicle,” boasted Dr. Crenshaw. “Right now, Robbie is dormant, because his little electric engine is hormonally sensitive.”
The Ayudi CEO said that the Robo-Bort’s power plant “starts to churn away — like an Energizer bunny — as soon as it gets a whiff of estrogen.”
Dr. Crenshaw explained that, after a consumer has registered a positive pregnancy test but opts against carrying her fetus to term, she need only tuck Robbie into the “appropriate opening” in her body. “And Robbie takes it from there!”
“Activated by the pungent ambience of estrogen, Robbie motors into mortal combat with that unwelcome zygote,” said Dr. Crenshaw. “His sensors are programmed to seek out that fertile embryo wherever it’s nesting in the uterus. Robo-Bort uses a triple combination of radar, sonar and lidar sensors — each less than one-hundredth of a millimeter in size — so hyper-sensitive that no egg can hide.”
Robbie, said Dr. Crenshaw, homes in on the chemistry of the incipient fetus “like a cheetah going after a gazelle on the Serengeti.”
Once the egg has been identified and targeted, Robbie becomes, in Dr. Crenhaw’s colorful description, “a suicide bomber.”
The Robo-Bort fighting vehicle, said its proud inventor, “empties its batteries, obliterating itself and frying the uterine invader in a fiery laser blast that wipes out every living cell within a one-centimeter radius.”
Dr. Crenshaw added, “But, of course, the woman inside of whom all this mayhem is taking place feels nothing. Not a pang. Not a twinge. Her only knowledge of what happened down there is — about 24 hours later — a stain on her panties.”
Dr. Crenshaw declined to discuss the political impact of Robo-Bort, but Raoul Spongeworthy, professor of contraceptive mechanics at the prestigious Polytechnic Institute of South Slovenia, called the Ayudi innovation a “game-changer.”
“This is an entirely digital appliance,” said Prof. Spongeworthy of Robo-Bort, which Ayudi packages in a sealed plastic capsule, bathed in sterile isopropyl alcohol. “You don’t buy it from a medical supplier or even get it at the drugstore. This miniature robot will be available at Best Buy, or online from Amazon or Big Lots. They’ll probably have these little assassins on sale in the checkout line at Piggly Wiggly, next to the breath mints and The National Enquirer.”
Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice organizations are aware of the Robo-Bort development but have thusfar refrained from comment, apparently awaiting the device’s official market rollout, scheduled for Mother’s Day 2016.
However, as one pro-choice advocate associated with one of the Democratic presidential campaigns, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “This little doo-hickey might be smaller than a fish egg, but if it does what they say, there’s gonna be thousands of anti-abortion activists choking on it.”
Asked to provide contact information for more details on Ayudi Solutions and Robo-Bort, Dr. Crenshaw regretfully refused, citing past attacks by pro-life extremists.
The Consumer Technology Association also chose silence.
to the battle over Roe v. Wade
by David Benjamin
MADISON Wis. — Visitors to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, had a thousand reason to be distracted. They were buzzed by drones, dazzled by chrome-crusted cars that run (without a driver) on everything from Wesson Oil to isotopes, and hypnotized by wide-screen ultra-definition, four-dimensional TV with sound so piercing that no bodily orifice was safe.
I was there. I saw all this stuff. So I understand how 180,000 conventioneers managed to overlook perhaps the most politically significant high-tech breakthrough of this — or any — decade. The brainchild of a small Texas startup called Ayudi Solutions, a tiny gadget cunningly called Robo-Bort 3000 poses the potential to end America’s long, divisive debate over abortion rights and contraception.
To illustrate the genius of this amazing device, Dr. Fallopia Crenshaw, Ayudi’s CEO, held out a handful of raw arborio rice and said, “Go ahead. Find Robbie.”
(“Robbie” is Ayudi’s copyrighted nickname for the Robo-Bort prototype.)
Picking out this minuscule medical miracle from the rice grains proved impossible because “Robbie” is virtually indistinguishable in both size and color.
But what does it do?
“Right now, if I were to set Robbie loose,” said Dr. Crenshaw, “it would perform a perfectly safe, 100-percent infallible, painless abortion in a span of roughly 30 minutes, on a fertilized human egg as far as six weeks into gestation. And all this happens in the home, with no need to visit a clinic, without the intervention of any medical professional, while the consumer rests comfortably, reading a magazine or watching ‘Oprah.’ And she doesn’t feel a thing.”
I frankly found this claim astounding and insisted on more details about the Robo-Bort technology.
Happy to comply, Dr. Crenshaw gripped the infinitesimal gadget gingerly with a tweezers and placed it beneath a microscope. Revealed there, under 400-percent magnification, was a fully articulated advanced-tactical combat vehicle painted for intra-uterine camouflage, with tank treads and a formidable cannon-like tube protruding from its tiny turret.
“What we’ve created, through microtechnology advances unique to Ayudi Solutions, is an itty-bitty variation on the U.S. Army’s famous Abrams Fighting Vehicle,” boasted Dr. Crenshaw. “Right now, Robbie is dormant, because his little electric engine is hormonally sensitive.”
The Ayudi CEO said that the Robo-Bort’s power plant “starts to churn away — like an Energizer bunny — as soon as it gets a whiff of estrogen.”
Dr. Crenshaw explained that, after a consumer has registered a positive pregnancy test but opts against carrying her fetus to term, she need only tuck Robbie into the “appropriate opening” in her body. “And Robbie takes it from there!”
“Activated by the pungent ambience of estrogen, Robbie motors into mortal combat with that unwelcome zygote,” said Dr. Crenshaw. “His sensors are programmed to seek out that fertile embryo wherever it’s nesting in the uterus. Robo-Bort uses a triple combination of radar, sonar and lidar sensors — each less than one-hundredth of a millimeter in size — so hyper-sensitive that no egg can hide.”
Robbie, said Dr. Crenshaw, homes in on the chemistry of the incipient fetus “like a cheetah going after a gazelle on the Serengeti.”
Once the egg has been identified and targeted, Robbie becomes, in Dr. Crenhaw’s colorful description, “a suicide bomber.”
The Robo-Bort fighting vehicle, said its proud inventor, “empties its batteries, obliterating itself and frying the uterine invader in a fiery laser blast that wipes out every living cell within a one-centimeter radius.”
Dr. Crenshaw added, “But, of course, the woman inside of whom all this mayhem is taking place feels nothing. Not a pang. Not a twinge. Her only knowledge of what happened down there is — about 24 hours later — a stain on her panties.”
Dr. Crenshaw declined to discuss the political impact of Robo-Bort, but Raoul Spongeworthy, professor of contraceptive mechanics at the prestigious Polytechnic Institute of South Slovenia, called the Ayudi innovation a “game-changer.”
“This is an entirely digital appliance,” said Prof. Spongeworthy of Robo-Bort, which Ayudi packages in a sealed plastic capsule, bathed in sterile isopropyl alcohol. “You don’t buy it from a medical supplier or even get it at the drugstore. This miniature robot will be available at Best Buy, or online from Amazon or Big Lots. They’ll probably have these little assassins on sale in the checkout line at Piggly Wiggly, next to the breath mints and The National Enquirer.”
Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice organizations are aware of the Robo-Bort development but have thusfar refrained from comment, apparently awaiting the device’s official market rollout, scheduled for Mother’s Day 2016.
However, as one pro-choice advocate associated with one of the Democratic presidential campaigns, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “This little doo-hickey might be smaller than a fish egg, but if it does what they say, there’s gonna be thousands of anti-abortion activists choking on it.”
Asked to provide contact information for more details on Ayudi Solutions and Robo-Bort, Dr. Crenshaw regretfully refused, citing past attacks by pro-life extremists.
The Consumer Technology Association also chose silence.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
The Weekly Screed (#753)
The Greatest Thing Since...
by David Benjamin
“Make a date today to see the U.S.A.
“And see it in a Chevrolet.”
— Dinah Shore
LAS VEGAS — Canned beer, go to your room.
Sliced bread, eat your heart out.
You have been eclipsed.
‘Cause Chevy has an EV!
(Electrified vehicle.)
This is big — so big that Bernie and Donald would call it yooge. I mean, YOOGE!
I’m wondering, why weren’t Bernie and Donald, Hillary, Ted and Marco here last week at the (huge) Consumer Electronics Show? They should’ve been because this is immense, colossal, presidential. (Plus, Nevada’s an early primary state.) It’s so big that General Motors chief Mary Barra — the First Lady of Detroit, Motown’s Big Momma, Empress of the EV — came all the way out to the desert, in the rain, to introduce the historic Chevrolet Bolt (that’s the Bolt, not the Volt, which is passé, last century’s semi-EV), to CES masses so massive that they snaked through the Westgate Hotel, stretching across the vast grounds of the Las Vegas Convention Center onto Paradise and all the broad boulevards of Sin City, and on, into the desert as far as Boulder City, Barstow, Marrakesh.
I mean, huge!
Even without Mary’s presence here, I could tell the Bolt EV’s unveiling was really, really ginormous from the sound effects. Mary was interrupted, repeatedly— deafeningly — by seat-rattling eruptions of biker-bar Heavy Metal, crashing through the Westgate Theater and loosening the fillings in the salivating mouths of 500,000 eager, ready-to-believe CES pilgrims, including hordes of martini-bound Mad Men in their shiny gray suits and the eternally loyal legion of high-tech weenies in their ballcaps, Mohawks and flip-flops.
Above the roar of a hundred 50-foot woofers, Mary Barra boasted the unprecedented virtues of the miracle Bolt. Encomia poured from her lips like a pryroclastic flow from a Mackinac Island volcano-top. The Bolt has, tucked in its tummy, a humongous battery pack (it’s huge), seething with enough energy to propel this sucker 200 breakneck miles non-stop, after which a mere 60 minutes at the plug will re-charge it back to 80 percent of full strength. Overnight, and it’s ready for a fresh 200. Vroom!
And that ain’t all, Parnelli! This baby has flat floors (no hump), back-bumper video that feeds straight into the rearview mirror and a ten-inch touchscreen that guarantees both increased and reduced driver distraction simultaneously. You can actually crash into a bridge abutment straight ahead while monitoring everything going on to the left, right and behind, ‘cause the Bolt has cameras everywhere — and ten airbags so that when you hit that bridge it might not kill your family.
Wait. There’s more.
Bolt has a low-draw Bluetooth capability, enabling a Wi-Fi hotspot, and it has both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, making it a sort of teen-texting orgy on wheels. Plus, there’s On Star 4G LTE (whatever that is), a smartphone app that provides remote start, charge-state updates, climate control, service alerts and EV-centric mapping. And you don't have to be in the car to do any of this stuff. You can send your Bolt off by itself to play in traffic. Plus, this creampuff is only 30 grand (if you apply to Uncle Sam for a $7,500 tax green-energy tax bonus). Not only all that, but you also get “gamification,” the thrilling option that “pits Bolt drivers against each other for green driving awards or rankings.”
Whoa, Nellie!
No wonder the vast CES crowd sat numbed and silent in their seats and filed out meekly after Mary finally buttoned her lips and the turbo-throbbing trade-show synthemusic subsided, leaving behind only the piercing hum of falsetto tinnitus in 10,000 ravaged eardrums.
Or, maybe…
It’s just another car.
Electric, yes. But we’ve had electricity since Tom Edison’s bulb. And the Bolt’s electricity is likely generated by a coal plant spewing dark clouds into the ozone, or an oil furnace, or a salmon-killing dam a hundred miles away from a “green” garage equipped with Bolt’s special optional home-recharging unit.
A car with a 200-mile leash and then you have to go to bed and wait?
America wants this?
Maybe. But this is Dinah Shore’s USA, where every redblooded gearhead guy harbors in his heart the subversive dream of chucking it all, climbing into his Camaro and driving — all day and all night, 85 miles an hour, with Steppenwolf on the stereo turned All The Way Up — toward the far horizon, to end up sucking down rum punches with a beach babe in Key West, or matching boilermakers with Athabasca Dick in an Anchorage dive.
Is there really a demand, even among accountants and actuaries, for a “green-driving,” speed-limit, battery-life drag race? Are we all hankering for Hollywood to launch a series of Slow and Serious car movies?
Or was Mary in Las Vegas to warn us that henceforth we’re all going to have to look for our cheap thrills and macho validation elsewhere than behind the wheel?
Was it Mary’s job to break the news, with the accompaniment of stroboscopic explosions and HD Imax-video razzle-dazzle, that the front-seat party is over and the gearshift is no longer America’s most-loved, best-polished phallic symbol?
Is Mary stage-whispering to us that John Milner really is dead, his yellow deuce coupe has been recycled into windmill blades, and there ain’t nobody cruising anywhere anymore?
Did Mary come from Detroit to deliver the news noisily in Vegas — world capitol of excess, extravagance, waste and profligacy — that the time has come for every one of us to take our foot off the gas, lower our expectations and kick our smelly habits, lest we end up knee-deep in polluted sea-water, coughing up lung-chunks as we consume ourselves into Jurassic oblivion?
Does the Grim Reaper drive an EV?
by David Benjamin
“Make a date today to see the U.S.A.
“And see it in a Chevrolet.”
— Dinah Shore
LAS VEGAS — Canned beer, go to your room.
Sliced bread, eat your heart out.
You have been eclipsed.
‘Cause Chevy has an EV!
(Electrified vehicle.)
This is big — so big that Bernie and Donald would call it yooge. I mean, YOOGE!
I’m wondering, why weren’t Bernie and Donald, Hillary, Ted and Marco here last week at the (huge) Consumer Electronics Show? They should’ve been because this is immense, colossal, presidential. (Plus, Nevada’s an early primary state.) It’s so big that General Motors chief Mary Barra — the First Lady of Detroit, Motown’s Big Momma, Empress of the EV — came all the way out to the desert, in the rain, to introduce the historic Chevrolet Bolt (that’s the Bolt, not the Volt, which is passé, last century’s semi-EV), to CES masses so massive that they snaked through the Westgate Hotel, stretching across the vast grounds of the Las Vegas Convention Center onto Paradise and all the broad boulevards of Sin City, and on, into the desert as far as Boulder City, Barstow, Marrakesh.
I mean, huge!
Even without Mary’s presence here, I could tell the Bolt EV’s unveiling was really, really ginormous from the sound effects. Mary was interrupted, repeatedly— deafeningly — by seat-rattling eruptions of biker-bar Heavy Metal, crashing through the Westgate Theater and loosening the fillings in the salivating mouths of 500,000 eager, ready-to-believe CES pilgrims, including hordes of martini-bound Mad Men in their shiny gray suits and the eternally loyal legion of high-tech weenies in their ballcaps, Mohawks and flip-flops.
Above the roar of a hundred 50-foot woofers, Mary Barra boasted the unprecedented virtues of the miracle Bolt. Encomia poured from her lips like a pryroclastic flow from a Mackinac Island volcano-top. The Bolt has, tucked in its tummy, a humongous battery pack (it’s huge), seething with enough energy to propel this sucker 200 breakneck miles non-stop, after which a mere 60 minutes at the plug will re-charge it back to 80 percent of full strength. Overnight, and it’s ready for a fresh 200. Vroom!
And that ain’t all, Parnelli! This baby has flat floors (no hump), back-bumper video that feeds straight into the rearview mirror and a ten-inch touchscreen that guarantees both increased and reduced driver distraction simultaneously. You can actually crash into a bridge abutment straight ahead while monitoring everything going on to the left, right and behind, ‘cause the Bolt has cameras everywhere — and ten airbags so that when you hit that bridge it might not kill your family.
Wait. There’s more.
Bolt has a low-draw Bluetooth capability, enabling a Wi-Fi hotspot, and it has both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, making it a sort of teen-texting orgy on wheels. Plus, there’s On Star 4G LTE (whatever that is), a smartphone app that provides remote start, charge-state updates, climate control, service alerts and EV-centric mapping. And you don't have to be in the car to do any of this stuff. You can send your Bolt off by itself to play in traffic. Plus, this creampuff is only 30 grand (if you apply to Uncle Sam for a $7,500 tax green-energy tax bonus). Not only all that, but you also get “gamification,” the thrilling option that “pits Bolt drivers against each other for green driving awards or rankings.”
Whoa, Nellie!
No wonder the vast CES crowd sat numbed and silent in their seats and filed out meekly after Mary finally buttoned her lips and the turbo-throbbing trade-show synthemusic subsided, leaving behind only the piercing hum of falsetto tinnitus in 10,000 ravaged eardrums.
Or, maybe…
It’s just another car.
Electric, yes. But we’ve had electricity since Tom Edison’s bulb. And the Bolt’s electricity is likely generated by a coal plant spewing dark clouds into the ozone, or an oil furnace, or a salmon-killing dam a hundred miles away from a “green” garage equipped with Bolt’s special optional home-recharging unit.
A car with a 200-mile leash and then you have to go to bed and wait?
America wants this?
Maybe. But this is Dinah Shore’s USA, where every redblooded gearhead guy harbors in his heart the subversive dream of chucking it all, climbing into his Camaro and driving — all day and all night, 85 miles an hour, with Steppenwolf on the stereo turned All The Way Up — toward the far horizon, to end up sucking down rum punches with a beach babe in Key West, or matching boilermakers with Athabasca Dick in an Anchorage dive.
Is there really a demand, even among accountants and actuaries, for a “green-driving,” speed-limit, battery-life drag race? Are we all hankering for Hollywood to launch a series of Slow and Serious car movies?
Or was Mary in Las Vegas to warn us that henceforth we’re all going to have to look for our cheap thrills and macho validation elsewhere than behind the wheel?
Was it Mary’s job to break the news, with the accompaniment of stroboscopic explosions and HD Imax-video razzle-dazzle, that the front-seat party is over and the gearshift is no longer America’s most-loved, best-polished phallic symbol?
Is Mary stage-whispering to us that John Milner really is dead, his yellow deuce coupe has been recycled into windmill blades, and there ain’t nobody cruising anywhere anymore?
Did Mary come from Detroit to deliver the news noisily in Vegas — world capitol of excess, extravagance, waste and profligacy — that the time has come for every one of us to take our foot off the gas, lower our expectations and kick our smelly habits, lest we end up knee-deep in polluted sea-water, coughing up lung-chunks as we consume ourselves into Jurassic oblivion?
Does the Grim Reaper drive an EV?
Friday, January 1, 2016
The Weekly Screed (#752)
“Live long and prosper”
by David Benjamin
“To the moon, Alice!"
— Ralph Kramden
My wife, Hotlips, crack technology journalist, is in year-end listmaking mode. Everybody in the news biz does this. Among my favorite examples of this genre is the New York Times’ annual cavalcade of obituaries. The Times 2015 death march includes Leonard Nimoy, who — as Spock in Star Trek — portrayed one of the most memorable TV characters in history.
Spock got me wondering: Who might be the greatest television characters of all time, the Top Twenty in the TV Hall of Fame? I’ve been listmaking ever since.
My first chore was to decide my standards for eligibility. First rule: To make the list, a character had to originate on TV. This disqualifies both George Reeves’ and Dean Cain’s depictions of Superman, who started in DC Comics. It also eliminates literary lawyer Perry Mason, and classic antagonists Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. The Odd Couple was both a Broadway play and a movie before it hit TV.
As I plumbed my memory, I realized that the true test was whether I thought of the fictional character’s name before I could recall the name of the actor who played the part. For instance, who doesn’t struggle to recall the wonderful comic actress in I Love Lucy who played Ethel Mertz? (Vivian Vance.)
My list consists heavily of characters limned in the era of Big Three terrestrial broadcasting, before the explosion of cable, premium channels and online networks balkanized the viewing public into haves, have-nots and demographic silos. It’s hard to create a shared experience with a universal character when everyone has the power to customize his or her viewing tastes.
I also notice, with some chagrin, that my Top Twenty reflects the patriarchy of American showbiz, featuring more male than female icons. Since Hollywood has been building shows around male stars since Charlie Chaplin, this is an unavoidable imbalance. However, the No. 1 TV character of all time is, indisputably, the First Woman of television comedy, Lucy Ricardo. Lucille Ball’s bumbling, lovable Everywoman attained a timeless universality that can never be eclipsed.
So, here’s my Top Twenty TV Characters Ever, unranked, in alphabetical order. I do this with the humble awareness that I’m going to be told afterwards — by dozens of people — that I’ve left out somebody really important. Oh, well…
Sgt. Ernest G. Bilko, Phil Silvers, The Phil Silvers Show. America’s fascination with likeable rascals operating within the uptight military Establishment began here, with Silvers and the incorrigible Sgt. Bilko. His myriad successors include Bob Crane in Hogan’s Heroes, Ernest Borgnine in McHale’s Navy, Larry Storch in F Troop, Alan Alda in M*A*S*H, etc.
Marcia Brady, Maureen McCormick, The Brady Bunch. Marcia had forebears like Mary Stone (Shelley Fabares in The Donna Reed Show) and Patty Lane (The Patty Duke Show), but she was the quintessence for all time of the American bourgeois teenage princess. “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”
Archie Bunker, Carroll O’Connor, All in the Family. Just the name, “Archie Bunker,” evokes a host of political and social implications, a cascade of catchphrases, the face of Carroll O’Connor and the eternal ubiquity of family strife.
J.R. Ewing, Larry Hagman, Dallas. No primetime soap opera fascinated America like Dallas did, and this was mostly Hagman’s magic. He created a larger-than-life villain who was strangely attractive — possibly setting the stage for his clone, Donald Trump, to rule the nation as J.R. ruled TV in the 1980s.
Sgt. Joe Friday, Jack Webb, Dragnet. Jack Webb’s wonderfully caricatured deadpan detective established the template for every TV cop who followed in his footsteps. In 60 years, the character has barely changed. On Person of Interest, Jim Caviezel is doing Joe Friday (although with tongue-in-cheek) all over again.
Fred Flintstone, The Flintstones. With Allen Reed doing his voice, Fred Flintstone was the first animated character to crack primetime, opening the door for Homer Simpson and all the wisecracking ‘toons who now populate cable TV.
Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli, Henry Winkler, Happy Days. There has never been a comic outlaw more beloved than The Fonz. If Henry Winkler had not upstaged every other actor in Happy Days, the show would have died years earlier.
Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Mark Harmon, NCIS. Harmon — and the show’s creator, Donald Bellisario — accomplished the rare feat of devising a household name in the fragmented TV world of the 21st century. Of course, Gibbs’ similarities to Joe Friday are hardly coincidental.
Eddie Haskell, Adam Zolotin, Leave It To Beaver. Every other character on Beaver was a two-dimensional morality-play, whitebread cliché. Eddie Haskell, Wally’s smarmy, conniving sidekick, changed TV by introducing a touch of evil to the family sitcom.
Cliff Huxtable, Bill Cosby, The Cosby Show. Cosby’s Cliff was the synthesis of all the wise, middle-class TV dads who’d gone before, including Jim Anderson (Father Knows Best), Ward Cleaver, Danny Thomas, Andy Taylor, John Walton, Mike Brady, Steven Keaton (Family Ties), etc. But, by leveraging white-liberal guilt, Cosby built a me-too character into the last sacred sitcom father-figure.
Dr. Richard Kimball, David Janssen, The Fugitive. This landmark show was among the first continuous-plot TV dramas ever attempted. It altered America’s weekly schedule. The Fugitive succeeded partly because Janssen and Barry Morse (Lt. Girard) played off each other so well.
Alice Kramden, Audrey Meadows, The Honeymooners. I was going to give this spot to Jackie Gleason (Ralph Kramden), until I re-read a few scripts and realized that Alice — one of TV’s first, best, funniest standup strong-woman characters, got all the good lines. Gleason was Audrey Meadows’ straight man.
Kramer, Michael Richards, Seinfeld. The show was named after Jerry Seinfeld, but Kramer stole every scene he was in and starred in most of the show’s best bits.
Mr. Ed, with the voice of Allan Lane. A horse is a horse, of course, of course, but Mr. Ed, with Alan Young as his foil, Wilbur, transcended every other animal-based TV show ever made — including, yes, even Lassie (which reverted far to often to the Timmy-down-the abandoned-mineshaft plotline). Besides, Lassie started out as a movie, and the title bitch was played on TV by a male dog.
Paladin, Richard Boone, Have Gun, Will Travel. American TV has a great history of Wild West heroes, including Matt Dillon, Maverick, Gil Favor and Hoss Cartwright. But Richard Boone’s Paladin was both unique and the archetype.
Lucy Ricardo, Lucille Ball, I Love Lucy. If only for the chicken farming episode, Lucy’s adventures on the candy-factory assembly line, and her Vitameatavegamin commercial, Lucy Ricardo merits immortality.
Mary Richards, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary introduced the modern working girl to American television, without sacrificing femininity, vulnerability or Lucy-caliber laughs.
Jim Rockford, James Garner, The Rockford Files. Since Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the down-at-the-heels, smartass private eye has been a staple of American culture. Rockford Files creator Stephen J. Cannell distilled this great cinematic and literary heritage into the classic L.A. PI. James Garner added just the right measures of wit, cunning, slapstick and panache.
Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini, The Sopranos. Tony Soprano was the first super-character of the premium-TV era. He added to the television landscape an unprecedented depth of moral ambiguity, opening the door for love him/hate her characters like Don Draper (Jon Hamm in Mad Men), Walter White (Brian Cranston in Breaking Bad) and Patty Hewes (Glenn Close in Damages).
And, last but almost most, Spock, Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek. The ears, the relentless attachment to “logic,” the flashes of human frailty, all those mind-melds. There will never be a TV extraterrestrial so familiar and beloved.
Among other characters I considered were Bullwinkle J. Moose, Ben Casey, Jed Clampett, Beaver Cleaver, Columbo, Matt Dillon, Dr. Johnny Fever, Barney Fife, Flipper, Lt. Al Giardello, Gilligan, Dobie Gillis, Lou Grant, Bob Hartley, Jeannie, Capt. Kirk, Omar Little, the Lone Ranger, Perry Mason, Maverick, Jack McCoy, Barney Miller, Ozzie Nelson, Ed Norton, Radar O’Reilly, Rob Petrie, Homer Simpson, Samantha Stephens, John Boy Walton, Arnold Ziffel, and on, and on, and on…
by David Benjamin
“To the moon, Alice!"
— Ralph Kramden
My wife, Hotlips, crack technology journalist, is in year-end listmaking mode. Everybody in the news biz does this. Among my favorite examples of this genre is the New York Times’ annual cavalcade of obituaries. The Times 2015 death march includes Leonard Nimoy, who — as Spock in Star Trek — portrayed one of the most memorable TV characters in history.
Spock got me wondering: Who might be the greatest television characters of all time, the Top Twenty in the TV Hall of Fame? I’ve been listmaking ever since.
My first chore was to decide my standards for eligibility. First rule: To make the list, a character had to originate on TV. This disqualifies both George Reeves’ and Dean Cain’s depictions of Superman, who started in DC Comics. It also eliminates literary lawyer Perry Mason, and classic antagonists Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. The Odd Couple was both a Broadway play and a movie before it hit TV.
As I plumbed my memory, I realized that the true test was whether I thought of the fictional character’s name before I could recall the name of the actor who played the part. For instance, who doesn’t struggle to recall the wonderful comic actress in I Love Lucy who played Ethel Mertz? (Vivian Vance.)
My list consists heavily of characters limned in the era of Big Three terrestrial broadcasting, before the explosion of cable, premium channels and online networks balkanized the viewing public into haves, have-nots and demographic silos. It’s hard to create a shared experience with a universal character when everyone has the power to customize his or her viewing tastes.
I also notice, with some chagrin, that my Top Twenty reflects the patriarchy of American showbiz, featuring more male than female icons. Since Hollywood has been building shows around male stars since Charlie Chaplin, this is an unavoidable imbalance. However, the No. 1 TV character of all time is, indisputably, the First Woman of television comedy, Lucy Ricardo. Lucille Ball’s bumbling, lovable Everywoman attained a timeless universality that can never be eclipsed.
So, here’s my Top Twenty TV Characters Ever, unranked, in alphabetical order. I do this with the humble awareness that I’m going to be told afterwards — by dozens of people — that I’ve left out somebody really important. Oh, well…
Sgt. Ernest G. Bilko, Phil Silvers, The Phil Silvers Show. America’s fascination with likeable rascals operating within the uptight military Establishment began here, with Silvers and the incorrigible Sgt. Bilko. His myriad successors include Bob Crane in Hogan’s Heroes, Ernest Borgnine in McHale’s Navy, Larry Storch in F Troop, Alan Alda in M*A*S*H, etc.
Marcia Brady, Maureen McCormick, The Brady Bunch. Marcia had forebears like Mary Stone (Shelley Fabares in The Donna Reed Show) and Patty Lane (The Patty Duke Show), but she was the quintessence for all time of the American bourgeois teenage princess. “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”
Archie Bunker, Carroll O’Connor, All in the Family. Just the name, “Archie Bunker,” evokes a host of political and social implications, a cascade of catchphrases, the face of Carroll O’Connor and the eternal ubiquity of family strife.
J.R. Ewing, Larry Hagman, Dallas. No primetime soap opera fascinated America like Dallas did, and this was mostly Hagman’s magic. He created a larger-than-life villain who was strangely attractive — possibly setting the stage for his clone, Donald Trump, to rule the nation as J.R. ruled TV in the 1980s.
Sgt. Joe Friday, Jack Webb, Dragnet. Jack Webb’s wonderfully caricatured deadpan detective established the template for every TV cop who followed in his footsteps. In 60 years, the character has barely changed. On Person of Interest, Jim Caviezel is doing Joe Friday (although with tongue-in-cheek) all over again.
Fred Flintstone, The Flintstones. With Allen Reed doing his voice, Fred Flintstone was the first animated character to crack primetime, opening the door for Homer Simpson and all the wisecracking ‘toons who now populate cable TV.
Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli, Henry Winkler, Happy Days. There has never been a comic outlaw more beloved than The Fonz. If Henry Winkler had not upstaged every other actor in Happy Days, the show would have died years earlier.
Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Mark Harmon, NCIS. Harmon — and the show’s creator, Donald Bellisario — accomplished the rare feat of devising a household name in the fragmented TV world of the 21st century. Of course, Gibbs’ similarities to Joe Friday are hardly coincidental.
Eddie Haskell, Adam Zolotin, Leave It To Beaver. Every other character on Beaver was a two-dimensional morality-play, whitebread cliché. Eddie Haskell, Wally’s smarmy, conniving sidekick, changed TV by introducing a touch of evil to the family sitcom.
Cliff Huxtable, Bill Cosby, The Cosby Show. Cosby’s Cliff was the synthesis of all the wise, middle-class TV dads who’d gone before, including Jim Anderson (Father Knows Best), Ward Cleaver, Danny Thomas, Andy Taylor, John Walton, Mike Brady, Steven Keaton (Family Ties), etc. But, by leveraging white-liberal guilt, Cosby built a me-too character into the last sacred sitcom father-figure.
Dr. Richard Kimball, David Janssen, The Fugitive. This landmark show was among the first continuous-plot TV dramas ever attempted. It altered America’s weekly schedule. The Fugitive succeeded partly because Janssen and Barry Morse (Lt. Girard) played off each other so well.
Alice Kramden, Audrey Meadows, The Honeymooners. I was going to give this spot to Jackie Gleason (Ralph Kramden), until I re-read a few scripts and realized that Alice — one of TV’s first, best, funniest standup strong-woman characters, got all the good lines. Gleason was Audrey Meadows’ straight man.
Kramer, Michael Richards, Seinfeld. The show was named after Jerry Seinfeld, but Kramer stole every scene he was in and starred in most of the show’s best bits.
Mr. Ed, with the voice of Allan Lane. A horse is a horse, of course, of course, but Mr. Ed, with Alan Young as his foil, Wilbur, transcended every other animal-based TV show ever made — including, yes, even Lassie (which reverted far to often to the Timmy-down-the abandoned-mineshaft plotline). Besides, Lassie started out as a movie, and the title bitch was played on TV by a male dog.
Paladin, Richard Boone, Have Gun, Will Travel. American TV has a great history of Wild West heroes, including Matt Dillon, Maverick, Gil Favor and Hoss Cartwright. But Richard Boone’s Paladin was both unique and the archetype.
Lucy Ricardo, Lucille Ball, I Love Lucy. If only for the chicken farming episode, Lucy’s adventures on the candy-factory assembly line, and her Vitameatavegamin commercial, Lucy Ricardo merits immortality.
Mary Richards, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary introduced the modern working girl to American television, without sacrificing femininity, vulnerability or Lucy-caliber laughs.
Jim Rockford, James Garner, The Rockford Files. Since Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the down-at-the-heels, smartass private eye has been a staple of American culture. Rockford Files creator Stephen J. Cannell distilled this great cinematic and literary heritage into the classic L.A. PI. James Garner added just the right measures of wit, cunning, slapstick and panache.
Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini, The Sopranos. Tony Soprano was the first super-character of the premium-TV era. He added to the television landscape an unprecedented depth of moral ambiguity, opening the door for love him/hate her characters like Don Draper (Jon Hamm in Mad Men), Walter White (Brian Cranston in Breaking Bad) and Patty Hewes (Glenn Close in Damages).
And, last but almost most, Spock, Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek. The ears, the relentless attachment to “logic,” the flashes of human frailty, all those mind-melds. There will never be a TV extraterrestrial so familiar and beloved.
Among other characters I considered were Bullwinkle J. Moose, Ben Casey, Jed Clampett, Beaver Cleaver, Columbo, Matt Dillon, Dr. Johnny Fever, Barney Fife, Flipper, Lt. Al Giardello, Gilligan, Dobie Gillis, Lou Grant, Bob Hartley, Jeannie, Capt. Kirk, Omar Little, the Lone Ranger, Perry Mason, Maverick, Jack McCoy, Barney Miller, Ozzie Nelson, Ed Norton, Radar O’Reilly, Rob Petrie, Homer Simpson, Samantha Stephens, John Boy Walton, Arnold Ziffel, and on, and on, and on…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)