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I can't take much more of this. Two weeks to go, and I'm at the end of my rope. I can't work. I can eat, but mostly standing up. I'm anxious all the time and taking it out on my ex-wife, which, ironically, I'm finding enjoyable. This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it's worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there's still a potential cure. With this, there's no cure. The result is final. Like death.
Five times a day I'll still say to someone, "I don't know what I'm going to do if McCain wins." Of course, the reality is I'm probably not going to do anything. What can I do? I'm not going to kill myself. If I didn't kill myself when I became impotent for two months in 1979, I'm certainly not going to do it if McCain and Palin are elected, even if it's by nefarious means. If Obama loses, it would be easier to live with it if it's due to racism rather than if it's stolen. If it's racism, I can say, "Okay, we lost, but at least it's a democracy. Sure, it's a democracy inhabited by a majority of disgusting, reprehensible turds, but at least it's a democracy." If he loses because it's stolen, that will be much worse. Call me crazy, but I'd rather live in a democratic racist country than a non-democratic non-racist one. (It's not exactly a Hobson's choice, but it's close, and I think Hobson would compliment me on how close I've actually come to giving him no choice. He'd love that!)
The one concession I've made to maintain some form of sanity is that I've taken to censoring my news, just like the old Soviet Union. The citizenry (me) only gets to read and listen to what I deem appropriate for its health and well-being. Sure, there are times when the system breaks down. Michele Bachmann got through my radar this week, right before bedtime. That's not supposed to happen. That was a lapse in security, and I've had to make some adjustments. The debates were particularly challenging for me to monitor. First I tried running in and out of the room so I would only hear my guy. This worked until I knocked over a tray of hors d'oeuvres. "Sit down or get out!" my host demanded. "Okay," I said, and took a seat, but I was more fidgety than a ten-year-old at temple. I just couldn't watch without saying anything, and my running commentary, which mostly consisted of "Shut up, you prick!" or "You're a fucking liar!!!" or "Go to hell, you cocksucker!" was way too distracting for the attendees, and finally I was asked to leave.
Assuming November 4th ever comes, my big decision won't be where I'll be watching the returns, but if I'll be watching. I believe I have big jinx potential and may have actually cost the Dems the last two elections. I know I've jinxed sporting events. When my teams are losing and I want them to make a comeback, all I have to do is leave the room. Works every time. So if I do watch, I'll do it alone. I can't subject other people to me in my current condition. I just don't like what I've turned into -- and frankly I wasn't that crazy about me even before the turn. This election is having the same effect on me as marijuana. All of my worst qualities have been exacerbated. I'm paranoid, obsessive, nervous, and totally mental. It's one long, intense, bad trip. I need to come down. Soon.
I am taking a vow of celibacy until the election of the next president, and I encourage you to do likewise. Don't have what reasonable people consider "sex"-- that is, I'm not just going by Bill Clinton's definition here -- before we know whether we've elected Obama or McCain to the White House. Reasons why:
- Time-sensitivity . Your free time in the days between now and the election is better spent working on the campaign than on having sex with people or trying to convince them to have sex with you. I cannot completely disavow carnal thoughts, but I can pledge to be mostly doing useful things while such thoughts meander through my head. You can, too. For example, calling voters in battleground states (you can think about sex while doing this, but don't talk about it). Or canvassing . I'm going to Pennsylvania to help get out the vote. I'll be going door to door, I think, unless they give me something different to do. Because I actually care quite a lot about who gets elected this year, I'll be much more interested in doing a good job than in having sex with other campaign workers (or random Pennsylvanians).
- Superstition . Before the Super Bowl, Tom Brady holed up with that supermodel, and look what happened. Gandhi was having sex right when his father died, and he always felt pretty rotten about that (and about sex in general). If Obama loses and you were having sex at the time (or in the days before, when you could have been calling swing voters), how will you feel?
- Consolation . Indeed, if Obama loses, it will be an incredibly good time to tap into all that pent-up sexual energy. You'll be able to at least briefly obliterate your sense of devastation by throwing yourself into frenzied sexual congress until you collapse in a strange delirium of satiety and despair.
- Catharsis . And what if Obama wins (as he well ought, at this point; but then again, Democrats are so good at losing)? Then you get to express your jubilation by having long-awaited celebratory sex with another, or several other, similarly elated individuals. (Console McCain voters at your discretion.) What a pleasing and delightful election night scenario: progressives all across America happily, amorously entwined in triumph.
Regardless of the outcome, it's an additional reason to look forward to the evening of November 4th. If there's any sort of prolonged Supreme Court situation, however, I reserve to right to cancel my vow.
The first season of Freakazoid! came out on DVD at the end of July, and it's frankly better than it has any right to be. A product of the underratedly brilliant team that produced Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs -- possibly the greatest half-hour animated show other than The Simpsons and South Park -- Freakazoid! was marketed as a kid's show with witty humor for adults, but really it was nothing less than a spiritual descendent of Looney Tunes , and a worthy sibling to Animaniacs .
Stylistically somewhere between the great superhero parody The Tick (the animated show, not the disappointing live-action show) and Marx Brothers-style vaudeville, it was the cartoon equivalent of an S.J. Perelman short story: almost disconcertingly absurd, completely nonsensical, but absolutely hilarious.
Like much great comedy, the show strongly evoked -- and outright stole -- from greater influences. In the commentary to the very first scene of the very first episode, Freakazoid voice (and frequent writer) Paul Rugg exclaimed joyfully, "We took this from Marty Feldman!" He then told everyone watching to go Google Feldman, an unjustly forgotten, memorably bug-eyed British comedian with a long sketch comedy career on the BBC but little in America beyond his famous performance as Eye-Gor in Young Frankenstein . He chortled with glee in a later scene when he explained another character onscreen was being voiced by Kenneth Mars, reprising his role as the German police constable in Young Frankenstein . It would be hard to think of better source material to lovingly rip off.
Moreover, a large part of Freakazoid's dual identity -- nerd Dexter Douglas, out of control superhero alter ego Freakazoid -- is an extended dual impression of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor , both nerd and suave hep cat. The effect is magical, a hoary, twinkling Borsht Belt timeliness that informs every rapid-fire joke, every sight gag, every non-sequitur. Don't like the joke? Wait fifteen seconds.
It is, like its forbears, extremely self-referential, and gets a lot of mileage out of meta-comedy: playing with genre, playing with form, and making jokes about what they're doing while they're doing it. Since the show is a scattershot mixture of slapstick, absurdism, metahumor, references, non sequiturs, and running gags, a lot of the jokes are expected to go over the heads of the target audience. Of course, not all of them work, and a show that uses Jerry Lewis as its inspiration certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea.
The show's essential disregard for plot or storylines -- they exist, but they don't really matter, and the writers make it clear that's the point -- makes everything meta at some level or another. The jokes are mostly incidental to the plot, or, rather, the plot is mostly incidental to the jokes. As in the movie Airplane! , the hackneyed situations are really just a background for every type of wordplay and gag the writers and improvising voice actors can think of.
Comic pastiche, more or less an ironic form of parody, is a very common form of modern humor, from Looney Tunes to The Simpsons and less inspired knockoffs like Shrek , Family Guy , and Drawn Together . It's essentially a copy-and-paste act: put a bunch of recognizable objects into the same space, and laugh at the incongruity. The key, really, is love: if you truly love Marty Feldman, the care with which you paste him into a children's show -- and the degree of inspiration you use in recontextualizing him -- will show through even if the kids (understandably) have no idea who he is or what you're doing. In other words, if you build a punchline, they will come.
If you don't particularly care, you'll end up with something like Epic Movie , or Not Another Teen Movie , or An American Carol : a punchlineless revue of people in costumes dressed like people from other movies, just going through the motions in the hopes that someone in the audience will give a laugh of recognition until the next 15-second tableau. It's a thin line, but a joke with no punchline deserves no laugh.
And Freakazoid! is overflowing with punchlines. It may not influence future generations of comedians, because it wears its own influences so baldly. It almost certainly won't last as long as Looney Tunes , whose collected cartoons comprise one of the most important cultural collaborative efforts of the 20th century and arguably one of the most important bodies of work in the history of comedy. But Freakazoid! sure is funny. It deserves to be watched again, by kids and adults alike. And, if by some miracle, DVD sales spike, and Jerry Lewis finally becomes popular outside France again, that would be a small price to pay.
Edible body pens and chocolate lotion imported from China were found by British regulators to be contaminated by melamine and removed from the shelves. The moral? Think Global, Shag Local?
Well, that won't make you safer. This Milk Crisis is far from over. The problems that give rise to China's quality control deficiencies are not limited to milk, and they're not something that can just be regulated away. Fixing the deficiencies will take years of acculturation. In the meantime, with our food and drug supply increasingly overrun with Chinese-made ingredients -- and with only a fraction of them inspected -- we're at risk.
When Michele Bachmann suggested on Chris Matthews' shoutfest of a show that the media needed to investigate members of Congress to determine which of them were anti-American , she was spot on. It's high time somebody investigated congresspeople -- nay, government officials in all three branches of government -- and rooted out the anti-Americans among them. Clearly, the people who run the American goverment have nothing but loathing in their hearts for, um, the American government.
So, let's start with the basics. How do we tell the anti-American pols from the decent, Mom-and-apple-pie, pro-American ones? Well, let's take a look at the oath they swear when they get into office:
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
So, clearly, the best way to go about rooting out these horrific evildoers among our representatives would be to take a close look at who has violated this oath. After all, whether conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, I think we can all agree that the Constitution is the very foundation of this great nation of ours.
Perhaps, then, we should investigate politicians who dismiss the Constitution as "just a goddamned piece of paper ." Obviously, they can't be counted on to take that oath seriously.
Similarly, anyone who dismisses the idea of three separate but co-equal branches, the fundamental basis of our Constitution and the government from which it ensues, should certainly warrant investigating. I mean, if you actually believe that, for example, the president can do absolutely anything he or she wants, with no limits , in his or her effort to protecet the country, that's a pretty anti-American view.
Heck, you could even make the argument that congresspeople who don't even want to address whether a presidential action (say, for example, warrantless domestic wire-tapping) is constitutional are shirking their oaths of office, and are therefore anti-American.
But perhaps more important than any of these would be Congresspeople who defy the most basic tenets of our beloved founding document. The anti-Americans that truly need to be rooted out, tarred, feathered and cast out of Congress are the people who violate America's most cherished freedoms -- freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of the press, freedom of religion ... all those nifty 1st amendment things. (Not to dismiss the rest of the Bill of Rights, of course. I'm also a huge fan of numbers 2 through 10. I especially love the 4th, which brings us back to that whole wire-tapping thing. But I digress.) So, to focus just on the freedom of religion aspect for a moment, when a Congressperson claims that God has ordained their membership in Congress , not the voters themselves, and then uses her time in Congress to promote a specific Christian worldview that is held by only a slim portion of members of that religion , perhaps they are the most anti-American of all.
So, thank you, Michele Bachmann. I couldn't agree more. Let the investigations begin!
In what McCain aides are hoping could be a "game-changer" in advance of tonight's third and final presidential debate, GOP nominee John McCain today expressed a strong vote of confidence in the marriage between Madonna and British film director Guy Ritchie.
Speaking to a group of supporters in a retirement home on Long Island, Sen. McCain departed from his prepared remarks to deliver his perspective on the Madonna-Ritchie union.
"My friends, I know a good many of you are concerned about Madonna's marriage," he said. "Well, I am here to tell you that the fundamentals of Madonna's marriage are strong."
The Arizona senator also unveiled his latest economic proposal, which involves sending a "surge" of US troops to America's banks.
"My friends, the surge worked in Iraq, and it will work in our banks," he said. "The only difference between Iraq and America's banking system is that Iraq has more money."
Perhaps in an effort to tamp down expectations for his candidate's performance in tonight's debate, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds spun it this way: "We'll consider it a victory if he doesn't fall off the edge of the stage."
Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times , and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com .
