A Blog of My Own

…there needs to be a national day of masturbating.

The United States of Tara proves that writer Diablo Cody is not a one-hit wonder or a one-trick pony. Her ear for fresh dialogue, so evident in the movie Juno, is once again the salient element. In this Showtime comedy series about a suburban mom (Toni Collette) with multiple personality disorder, people talk with a sound at once real and stylized, heightened — you listen for the next turn of phrase that sounds unlike anything you’ve quite heard before, and when it comes, it brings pleasure. Though you’d think such pointed stylization might make the dialogue sound contrived, it doesn’t; instead, it makes the characters seem more alive, I suppose because people in life do have their own, unique sonic and syntactical fingerprints. Or, contrarily (but leading to the same result), we desperately want to believe they do, that somewhere there are families who really do use language in so fresh a way, even if we haven’t run into them.

Beyond the pleasure of hearing bright people talk in surprising ways, there is an idea in The United States of Tara, one that goes deeper than the high concept of the show. On the surface, Tara is about a wife and mom who may at any point shift into the persona of one or another of a whole repertory company of characters due to her psychological condition. The more one wades into the two episodes that have aired so far, however, the more one notices that all the characters in the show, the central and more peripheral ones — Tara’s husband and kids, their coworkers and friends, etc. — have adopted personas that may or may not be who they “really” are. The only difference is that everyone but Tara picks one and sticks with it, while Tara gets to choose between several. But that, the show seems to say, is a trivial difference. The selection of a pair of funky eyeglasses, a punk-Samurai hairstyle, an attitude — these are the ways each of us controls the characterization we consciously or unconsciously choose to present to the world. Tara’s “dissociative identity disorder,” her abnormality, is a lens the show’s creators use to focus us on the artifice of the thing we call the social order, the alienation behind the thing we call normality. The show has a lot on its minds.

A year ago, just shy of its first anniversary, this blog crossed the 10,000-visit mark. Now, less than one year after that, with the blog’s second anniversary still more than a month away, it has crossed 50,000.

Thanks.

“His actions gave the whole corporation a black eye.”

“Abu Ghraib was a black eye on the U.S. military.”

Etc., etc.

Obviously, for whatever strange reason in our culture, black eyes are a symbol of humiliation. In comedy, going back to the days of silent film (and, who knows, maybe on the stage before that), the black eye is the icon of ignominious and utter defeat. Have a bruise on your jaw, nobody thinks too much about it; move that bruise just an inch or two north, so it’s under your eye, and society assigns it mortifying meaning. A treatise could be written on the irrational reasons this is so, but it is. So I thought if I ever had that marker, I wouldn’t be able to stand it.

And yet I do have one, and I don’t feel humiliated at all!

I woke up groggy to a ringing alarm in a hotel room in Las Vegas on Friday morning. The nightstand was to my left. I propped myself up on my left arm, and reached across myself with my right hand to turn off the alarm. As I did so, my left arm slipped completely off the edge of the mattress, and with it my sole means of support, plunging my head toward its fateful encounter with the corner of the nightstand.

A gash on my cheekbone bled profusely. When I got into the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror, my face was covered in blood, making identifying the exact location of the wound impossible until I washed it all off. My wife put some antibacterial ointment and a bandaid on it (she is prepared for anything), and I put on the hotel bathrobe, grabbed the ice bucket, and went down the hall to fill it. Upon returning to the room I wrapped some ice in a washcloth and put that on the wound for about a half hour.

On Saturday, the worst damage to my face was a circle of swelling on the insulted cheekbone. But this morning, the area under my left eye is all purplish.

I can tell some people are looking at me with more than the usual amount of interest, but I don’t particularly care. And that surprises me. Although my face wears our culture’s agreed-upon symbol of humiliation, I am not humiliated. It’s kind of nice to find that out.

A billion words will be written about Barack Obama’s strong, sinewy inaugural address, so I’d like to write about how pleasantly surprised I was by Rick Warren’s invocation.

As an evangelical and a favorite of the right wing, he came to this moment surrounded by controversy. As a Jew and a Democrat, I was prepared to hear his speech with a jaundiced ear. But I was moved. He cut to the heart of the moment. In fact, judged only by my own tears, he provided the most moving and profound portion of the morning, which is saying something.

As Warren neared the end of his speech, I was glad not to have heard the name of Jesus invoked. That name, in a speech addressed to all Americans, excludes all Americans who don’t accept him as their savior. But then he did. I don’t know whether it is traditional to say Jesus’s name in Presidential inaugural ceremonies (I expect that if I look far back enough in history, I will find it a common occurence), but it sounded a slightly troubling note. On the other hand, Warren earlier in his speech invoked the words of the Sh’ma, the central prayer of the Jewish faith: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One.” So I guess fair is fair. In any case, the Jesus moment was at worst a single instant in a speech that otherwise remarkably struck just the right notes (unless you are an atheist, in which case, you can take heart from the words in Obama’s speech when he gave an inclusionary shout-out to you), so I forgive him.

To change the world, change yourself, they say. And since you are what you eat, perhaps the most effective way to create real systemic change in the world is by partaking of this cookie.

I’m gonna go with that.

Obama cookie by Café Selmarie, Chicago; photograph by Angie Naron.

Well guess what and golly gee. When I wrote on January 2, regarding the stated intention of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and senior U.S. Senator from Illinois Dick Durbin to find any nominee chosen by Gov. Rod Blagojevich “unacceptable,”

way to unnecessarily provoke a constitutional crisis and make yourselves look like asses when you lose, Democratic Senate leadership,

I was right!

Question: If I, an ordinary U.S. citizen, knew that according to our Constitution, Roland Burris, being legally appointed by a sitting state governor, had an undeniable claim on this Senate seat, why did it take the Democratic leaders of the Senate ten days to know it?

Asses.

The older you get, the more movies you’ve seen, the harder it is to get carried away by one. (Inevitably you begin to put every movie you see in the context of some other movie you’ve seen. You become impossible to surprise. You wise up to the ways movie work, and with wisdom comes, sadly, emotional distance. If, let’s say, everyone views 100,000 movies in a lifetime, when you’re twenty you’ve seen only 5,000 of them and still have 95,000 to go. Every movie is new to you. When you’re older, and you’ve seen 95,000, no way movies can mean to you what they once did. There are only so many stories, and so many ways to tell them.) But there are exceptions. Like Slumdog Millionaire.

I thought I was past the time when a movie could grip me with suspense from beginning to end, make me feel a character’s fate was my own, put me in a whole new world, make me feel the terror of that world completely. Well, not yet, I’m not. That’s the happy lesson I learned from Slumdog Millionaire.

This is not a special opinion, since at least eight different friends told me I needed to see it, but now that I have, let me add my voice to the chorus.

How’s this for reality? Dick Clark is a severely impaired stroke victim — yet he’s on TV on New Year’s Eve!

I think it’s fantastic.

For just a couple hours every year, on just one channel, TV allows just one person who is not perfect onto its bright and shiny airwaves. A person who didn’t recover from his illness to become “good as new.” A person who has a severe speech impediment and looks kind of funny, and whose brain maybe isn’t 100% functional. A person who, by the standards of TV, is, yes, cringe-worthy.

The unspoken message: “I’m here, I’m impaired, get used to it.”

According to the American Heart Association, stroke is our country’s leading cause of serious long-term disability. Every year, 600,000 new victims and 200,000 more who are having a second or third stroke — almost a million Americans in all — get added to the statistic.

So, hurrah, Dick Clark, for insisting you go on, and hurrah, ABC, for letting it happen, so that television can show us what diversity really looks like. Even if it is for only two hours on one network on the last night of the year, it’s a start.

Obama is fond of saying, when pressed on policy matters during this interim period before his inauguration, “We have only one President at a time, and it is George Bush.” Quite right. It is equally true that Illinois only has one governor at a time, and that governor is Rod Blagojevich.

What ought to be happening now, is that we ought to be paying attention to the law, not to our sense of high moral dudgeon. The law is explicit on what happens when Illinois has a U.S. Senate vacancy. It’s called the Constitution, specifically the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and it says the governor makes the appointment. Here’s something it doesn’t say: “The governor makes the appointment as long as everyone has confidence in the governor’s honesty.” Here’s something else it doesn’t say: “The governor makes the appointment as long as everybody is pretty sure the governor is going to be the governor for a while.” It says the governor makes the appointment.

What part of that is ambiguous?

Just as there are laws that make explicit what is supposed to happen when we have a Senate vacancy, there are laws that lay out the process for the indictment and conviction of bribetakers, and for the impeachment of state officeholders who have betrayed the public trust. We do not have to make this thing up from scratch. We don’t have to wring our hands about what to do next. We don’t have to manufacture a constitutional crisis over this. All we have to do is follow the law.

What should happen:

1) Since, in my opinion, Blagojevich is a crook, he should be impeached and removed from office, and indicted and convicted in federal court, ASAP.

2) Since he has not yet been indicted or impeached, he should be fulfilling his obligations as governor and appointing a person to fill our empty Senate seat. This, to his credit, he has done. We are entitled to two U.S. senators just as every other state is.

In failing to impeach the governor by now, the Illinois legislature has, in effect, mandated that Blagojevich make the appointment. That is not what they intended, but that is what they have done. Given this, it’s a good thing Blagojevich did so — especially since neither his conviction nor his impeachment are foregone conclusions. Can anyone say with surety that he will not still be Governor of Illinois a year from now? No, they can’t. Are we supposed to go without a U.S. senator that long? No, we are not.

The pronouncements by the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate that they are not going to accept a Blagojevich choice are outrageous. The Constitution says Blagojevich gets to make the pick. If the Senate rejects Roland Burris, Illinois should take the matter to the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of that rejection. (That won’t happen, because our state Attorney General happens to be an enemy of Blagojevich, but it should. In fact, if she fails to pursue this action on behalf of her constituents, the people of Illinois, Attorney General Lisa Madigan should be impeached.) In any case, if the state doesn’t take it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Roland Burris’ own attorney has already announced that he will. And he will win, because the law is straightforward. The Senate’s prerogatives in challenging the qualifications of incoming members are strictly limited to legal qualifications, such as, is the incoming senator a citizen of the state he represents, and is he at least 30 years old. Burris qualifies.

Way to unnecessarily provoke a constitutional crisis and make yourselves look like asses when you lose, Democratic Senate leadership.

Meanwhile, the press continues to try to hang this thing on Obama’s back, all the while expressing “concern” that it will cast a cloud over his presidency. There is no cause for concern, and no cloud – other than the one the press is creating! The jackals.

Everybody take a deep breath. U.S. Senate leaders, seat Roland Burris when he comes to Washington next week. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, pursue your criminal case against Rod Blagojevich. Illinois legislature, keep your impeachment inquiry on track and bring it to its conclusion expeditiously.

Christ, is that so complicated?

While we’re at it, here’s another thing that frosts my ass about the way the media is reporting this. They keep trotting out the Blago quote, “This thing is golden, I’m not giving it away for nothing,” as if that means something. Unless he was talking about a contribution to his own coffers (and he might have been, but this has not been proven), there is nothing at all untoward about that quote. Any politician would say it. Politics, famously, is the art of compromise, and compromise always means you give me something for what I give you. The quote, in itself, does not suggest anything different from the sort of logrolling we accept, relatively happily, as part of the American political process. The quid pro quo Blagojevich had in mind could have been, “I’m not giving this away — I’m going to hold out for a promise of $5 billion in federal capital improvement funds for my state.” I don’t think he did mean that, but there’s nothing in the quote that says he didn’t. So to keep repeating it as if it’s prima facie evidence of guilt (as I heard Rachel Maddow do the other night, but she’s not alone) is idiotic.