The episode of Futurama which airs this Thursday evening features a story about a comic book convention and among the guests is my amigo, Sergio Aragonés. He no longer has a body or (worse) his chin but the rest of him is reasonably intact, including his voice...which Sergio himself provided. I hope this appearance doesn't cause him to get a swelled head because, apparently, that will soon be all that remains of him.
William F. Buckley hosted the TV interview show Firing Line for 33 years of often-pretentious speech and pontification. He sounded eloquent, at least to those easily impressed by excessive syllables, but if you listened hard enough and could figure out what he was saying, it always struck me as shallow and selfish. There was this odd subtext that the world should be run by smart (by his measure) and wealthy people and that the poor and stupid should just do everyone a favor and comply or, better still, disappear. That's an exaggeration on my part but, at times, not a huge one. He was also darn good at over-intellectualizing topics to the point of missing the entire point. The first few minutes of a 1967 interview with Groucho Marx, which is our video embed below, demonstrates this.
I remember one time on his show Buckley really lost whatever remaining respect I had for him. It was a discussion about capital punishment...and I must admit I've never fully understood the Conservative point-of-view on the topic. It seems to be that though the government is always inept and that it should have as little control of our lives as possible...we can trust and even encourage it to execute people. That is, as long as it executes the people "we" (i.e., the upper class) know should be executed. In one discussion that amazed me, Buckley said he wasn't concerned about innocent people being put to death. We just needed to make sure we had smart jurors because, after all, any intelligent person could hear a case — or even just read the newspaper accounts of a trial — and know for certain who was guilty.
Mr. Buckley lived well into the time when efforts like the Innocence Project were using DNA to free (to date) 258 people from prison, many from convictions for First Degree Murder. To my knowledge, he never commented on this.
The Groucho excerpt — which I'll warn you ends abruptly — is from a new series of manufactured-on-demand DVDs that have been issued of Firing Line episodes. It's one per DVD for ten bucks and you can order the one with Groucho or ones with Ronald Reagan or Norman Mailer or Muhammad Ali or Hugh Hefner or dozens of others. I may get around to ordering the one with David Merrick. Here's a few minutes with Dr. Hackenbush looking like he's not entirely sure why he agreed to appear...
Dick Cavett weighs in on the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. By now, this whole thing seems to me to have devolved into one of those issues where both sides want to win because both sides want to win.
Here's how someone could make a decent amount of cash. They take the time and energy to learn the ins and outs of all the different phone company plans, especially the cell phone rates. Then they charge some bewildered person — like, say, me — $25 to look over our recent bills and to have a phone conversation where they tell us if we have the right rate plan and if not, what to switch to. Maybe for $35, they teach us how to truly understand the bills we're paying and they do it slowly and in a way that doesn't presume we know anything. But even if we only went for the first option, I bet most of us would save more than the $25 and we'd all save time trying to understand that which was designed to not be understood.
August 22, 2010
