Sarah Bird: In Your Guts, You'll Know She's Funny

When The Kinkster launched his ill-fated (and poorly conceived) campaign for Governor in 2006, his Texas Monthly humor column was suspended while The Kinkster chased his tail. As a substitute, Texas Monthly replaced The Kinkster with Sarah Bird. Upon The Kinkster's return, with his figuarative tail between his legs, the magazine opted for column by the Kinkster in odd-months and Sarah Bird in even-months. This month, Sarah Bird was LOL funny. If this is (fair & balanced) domestic bliss, so be it.

[x TX Monthly]
Hard Knocks: In Our House, "Door" Is A Four-Letter Word
By Sarah Bird

Doors are a marvelous invention that one doesn’t fully appreciate until they are removed from one’s home for several months. And held hostage. By Dog the Bounty Hunter. At least our door man looked like Dog: white-blond mullet, dried-riverbed complexion, wraparound shades. The kind of guy who can work the ear cuff, put his stink on a pair of leather wristbands. A guy who has stuff on his belt—useful, manly stuff.

Dog—the door man, not the bounty hunter—came to be in my employ thanks entirely to a freakish form of ESP that I possess that allows me to root out and hire the one person on earth guaranteed to bring maximum drama and minimum productivity to whatever job is at hand. It’s a gift. I didn’t ask for it. I never try to profit from it. I just have it. It’s how I found Missus Graciela, the house cleaner. All was well until her husband tried to poison her. How else could she explain the mysterious headaches? The alarming feeling of being drugged? The crushing weariness that left her unable to do anything more strenuous at my house than a bit of desultory dusting? Only after I insisted we talk to the police was the case cracked. “Oh, Missus Sarah, is not the poison! Is the coffee! Mi marido does not tell me he makes now only the descafeinado!” Okay. Sanka. Case closed.

Sensing that personnel management was not my strong suit, I avoided paid help until a looming book deadline forced me to hire a babysitter. She was a gorgeous UT coed. Let’s call her Leadfoot. My son, a slave to beauty, adored her. She nicknamed him Li’l Weiner, and, although authorized to make trips only to the neighborhood library and the swimming pool, she drove him all over town in my car. In spite of the fact that my gas tank was always empty without my going anywhere, it still took me several weeks to work up the nerve to confront Leadfoot. I waited until she and Li’l Weiner returned from a trip to “the swimming pool.” Leadfoot walked in dry as a bone, hair and makeup perfect, loaded down with bags from Old Navy and Abercrombie & Fitch. Li’l Weiner had a temporary tattoo of a unicorn on his cheek and smelled as though he’d been spritzed with Tommy Girl and Vanilla Musk. I presented Leadfoot with my record of secret odometer readings. She glanced at it, took a slurp of her Pumpkin-Spice Frappuccino and a bite out of her Cinnabon, and said, “Your mileage dealie’s broken.”

Desperate to get my child off the career path to long-distance trucking and to never say anything mean to anyone, I defaulted to a classic management strategy and told Leadfoot that my husband had lost his job. Sadly, we could no longer afford her exemplary services. She hugged Li’l Weiner goodbye with tears in her eyes, never knowing that she’d been fired.

Many happy years of self-service ensued, marred briefly by a painter who claimed “years of experience” in his ad. Only after he arrived wearing mad-scientist glasses and “painted” our living room using a braille method of running his fingers along the molding did he reveal where he’d gotten those “years of experience”: painting over graffiti at highway rest stops. We showed Fingertips the door. Literally. He couldn’t find it on his own.

And then, for some godforsaken reason, I decided that the perfectly serviceable doors in our house needed to be replaced—possibly because they were constructed of a balsa wood—like material that had delaminated, giving the doors the frayed and shaggy look of old cedar trees. Or it might have been their unique sound-amplification properties, which allowed us to yell peevish questions from one bedroom to another, like “I hear you in there. Are you eating the last of the Fiddle Faddle?” And, with heavy sarcasm, “Could you possibly turn those pages any louder?”

Like suspiciously cheap Porsches with Nigerian escrow accounts, Dog the Door Man came to us via Craigslist. In all fairness, Dog did know his doors. Dog was the Dean of Doors. In a just world, Dr. Dog would be lecturing somewhere on hollow versus solid core, bevels, reveals, swing, prehungs, and slabs. And that somewhere would not be my kitchen, where hours passed as he instructed me on all these fine points. That, and all the ways in which his past customers had been idiots conspiring to thwart his doorificence.

I ignored this warning signal and let him take every door in our house to his shop to use as patterns for our new ones. Bedrooms, bathrooms, closets: Dog took them all. Just for a day, he promised—two, tops. After a week filled with truck breakdowns and moving in with the widow of his old buddy Bear the Biker, we hung sheets where doors had once stood.

Two weeks later he returned, sans doors. He needed supplies to complete the job. And gas money. Rather than listen to Dog’s lengthy indictment of the United Snakes of Amerexxon, I reached for my checkbook. Dog asked to be paid in cash. He started to tell a convoluted story about bank overdrafts and a deadbeat ex-girlfriend ruining his credit, then stopped and confessed, “F— it. I can tell you’re good people. I been underground since 1970. Just dropped out and got lost in America.”

Probably another warning signal. Over the next two months, as gas and supplies money trickled out yet no “movable, usually solid, barrier[s] for opening and closing an entranceway” trickled back in, the absence of such barriers became especially poignant: There was nothing for any member of our increasingly annoyed family to slam. No matter how high the thread count, banging a sheet shut just didn’t provide the same emotional release. Our two dogs, however, loved the ease of access. No more scratching at forbidden bedroom doors, no more being beholden to every bipedal a-hole with a prehensile grip. They could nose their way in and out of every inch of the house.

Going into Day 90 of Doors Held Hostage, Dog stopped grounding his excuses in any door-related reality whatsoever. He no longer bothered to complain about the incompetent employees at “Slowe’s” and how those craven corporate greedheads at “Home Despot” had conspired to not carry the only drill bit up to his exacting standards. No, now the reason was simply “my old drinking buddies have found me.” When that excuse deteriorated into advice (“Never mix a bottle of Captain Morgan’s with Seconal”), we staged an intervention and retrieved our new doors. Our unpainted, knobless doors.

To his credit, after Dog sobered up, he apologized and insisted on hanging the doors. The dogs love them. With the merest tap of their little doggy snouts they can push any one of them wide open. Even the locked ones, sagging on their hinges. For the rest of us, “door” is now a four-letter word we don’t use around our house.

[Sarah Bird received a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1973 and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 1976. Bird was an editor and contributor for the no-longer-active Austin magazine Third Coast. She authored five romance novels under the name Tory Cates before publishing her 1986 comic novel Alamo House, set on frat row at a Texas university. Bird is the author of four other novels: Virgin of the Rodeo, The Boyfriend School, The Mommy Club, and most recently, How Perfect Is That. Bird lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, George, and son, Gabriel. Bird's humor columns alternate with those of Richard (Kinky) Friedman in Texas Monthly.]

Copyright © 2008 Texas Monthly Inc.

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In Your Guts You Know They're Nuts (And Stupid)!

BoBo Boy gives the back of his hand to The Mighty Quinnette in today's NY Fishwrap. BoBo Boy is a little too tolerant of Dutch's basic lack of brain-power: "Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them." The image remains of Dutch sitting with a book and moving his finger from word to word as his lips form the sounds of the letters. The basic thrust of BoBo Boy's jeremiad to the Dumbos is that they've dumbed down to the lowest common denominator that was available in 2008. The Mighty Q isn't "smart," as BoBo Boy asserts. Cunning, yes. Smart, no. If this is (fair & balanced) fatuity, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Class War Before Palin
By David Brooks

Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.

Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, Rebel-in-Chief, Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

[David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times and has become a prominent voice of politics in the United States. Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history. He served as a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." Brooks has written a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks also writes articles and makes television appearances as a commentator on various trends in pop culture, such as internet dating. He has been largely responsible for coining the terms "bobo," "red state," and "blue state." His newest book is entitled On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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