Friday, January 30, 2004

Two Quick Points

First off, I just edited the previous post to remove the "f" word. I had a couple of complaints, one of which made a lot of sense to me. It's too long to post here but essentially, the guy said, "I encourage my kids to read your site because I like the way you express yourself. I don't want them to read sites which employ foul language and I don't like taking your site away from them because you curse once every four years. So either curse more often or not at all." I think it's wrong to pretend you can shield kids from such words and also wrong to make a big deal out of them. But I also think it's a parent's right to make that decision and the guy is right. I did kind of spring it as a surprise, so I took it out.

Secondly: My e-mail goes through a complex routing of various Internet Service Providers, some of which have been filtering to try and cut down on the percentage of messages that contain the "MyDoom" virus. At the same time, I deleted a few hundred infected messages on my end and I seem to have also nuked a few real ones in the process. So if I don't respond to an e-mail you sent recently, it may be because I didn't receive it. If it's important, please send it again. Thenk yew.

• Posted at 11:43 PM · LINK

The Face of Politics

Political websites are currently erupting with the charge that John Kerry has had Botox injections in his face, especially his forehead. May I be among the first to ask, "Who cares?"

I've decided. I'm going to cast my presidential vote for whichever candidate runs on what they're actually going to do for the next four years, as opposed to trying to convince us that "there's something wrong" with the other guy. There actually may be something wrong with the other guy, at least in the sense that there's probably something wrong with anyone who wants to be President. But if Kerry's the nominee, I don't want to listen to months of hearing about his hair and his long face and how he almost looks French. Just as I don't want to hear that Bush's ability to scramble sentence structures proves that he's stupid. No, it doesn't prove that. Nor does it tell us a lot about a man that he was born into privilege or that he keeps marrying into it. To me, when they're bringing that kind of stuff up, it's because they don't have anything intellectually honest to say about the stuff that matters. (This also applies to trying to make the election about trivial issues like school uniforms, burning the American flag, steroid use by athletes and maybe even going to Mars. The space effort itself is not trivial but it is when it's not going to receive sufficient funding to actually do something.)

This personal crap is not new to politics. In the first presidential race I was old enough to follow, some were trying to make an issue of Kennedy's religion while others were telling us Nixon was too shifty-eyed to trust. Then Johnson was a wimp, whereas Goldwater was so pathological about Communism that he was going to get us into a nuclear war...and so on. It's a sad commentary on the American electorate that right this minute, there are strategists sitting around, trying to figure out how to market the notion that an opponent has serious psychological problems and/or that how he dresses, what he eats or other details of his life prove "he's not one of us." I don't think anyone who has ever gotten seriously near the presidency is "one of us." If you think they are, you're probably one of those people who thought John Wayne was a war hero, O.J. Simpson was a great role model, or that when Rock Hudson wasn't making movies, he was out banging hot chicks.

• Posted at 3:03 PM · LINK

One More Paar Story

Someone suggested I tell the story about Jack Paar walking accidentally onto a live broadcast of a game show hosted by Merv Griffin. I already did: It's here. (Griffin told it the other night on Larry King Live. Not as well, I might add.) So instead, I'll tell the story about the time Paar replaced Walter Cronkite as the host of the CBS Morning Show. It was a killer assignment: A two-hour live broadcast each day, but because of time zone differences, they had to do three hours, repeating in the third hour some of the things done in the first. Some parts of the country would get the first two hours and some would get the last two, and Paar sometimes went crazy trying to remember not to refer to things said earlier in the show because for some viewers, those things hadn't been said yet. Anyway, Cronkite had failed and Paar, the all-purpose utility infielder TV host, was brought in. There was strong sentiment at the network to dump him and reinstate Cronkite so they kept a running tally of the mail...how many letters wanted Walter back, how many letters preferred Jack. Because his career was on the line, Paar would go by the mailroom every day and check the current tally. One day he walked in and they told him, "We're not sure how to score this letter." It was a handwritten note that said, "I'm sorry Walter Cronkite is no longer on the show because I always enjoyed him." And it was signed by Jack Paar's mother.

• Posted at 2:29 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's an editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the pending ban on gay marriage in Georgia. I agree with the view expressed and was especially intrigued by this part...

Ten, 20, 30 years from now, we're going to have to go back into the Georgia Constitution to pull this hateful language out. And some of the very politicians who today will vote in favor of that language will no doubt be there when it is repealed, sheepishly trying to explain how it wasn't really about hate and discrimination, how back then they were just worried about protecting marriage and the family.

That's playing the race card without playing the race card, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of politicians all over (and certainly in Atlanta) who once voted for segregation but now turn backflips to try and explain how such-and-such a vote wasn't really a racist act. The analogy between race and sexual preference only goes so far but I think it works here. We will someday regard "defense of marriage" as the same kind of hateful codewords as "separate but equal."

• Posted at 12:41 PM · LINK