Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The Snuff Queen Among The Geezers

Wobegone Boy goes to the dark side with thoughts of putting geezers out of their misery and a young woman's suicide. If this is a (fair & balanced) meditation on The End, so be it.

[x Salon]
Youth And Euthanasia
By Garrison Keillor

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This world belongs to the young and the daring, the avid, the adventurous, and that's why one follows the saga of corporate bailouts with a certain trepidation. We're mortgaging the future and we are rescuing the stubborn and stupid. The cost of a good college education for the young and daring is stupefying; meanwhile the federal deficit yawns, tax increases lie ahead, job losses per month are like a major city getting wiped out, and India and China are doing what we used to do better.

So why does my mind keep drifting back to the woman I knew when I was in college, a writer like me, tall and magnificent, languorous, delightful, whose thighs were so ticklish that when I kissed them she burst out laughing. She lay shrieking and writhing and that was my sexual initiation, a link between the erotic and the comic, make of it what you will. And now when I hear young women laugh loudly, as I did last night, I think of her and wonder where she is and who is making her laugh.

Last night a couple of friends and I were in a restaurant, eating local produce and discussing the world's troubles, and we were on the subject of the Middle East and its intractable troubles when peals of girlish laughter rang out from the booth behind us. I had tuned out of International Relations a few minutes before and tuned into the program next door, so I got the joke.

One woman was talking about her mother, a nurse in a nursing home, and about a cocktail of morphine with a few additives that Mom would serve to select patients when she felt quite sure that they wished to be released from the bonds of earth. She ushered them out of the world around 4 a.m., when it was quiet — "Hearing is the last sense you lose at the end, so if an old man hears a ballgame on the radio, he may come bounding back to life to catch the score" — and she made sure that someone was around to hold the dying person's hand. Death came painlessly around 7 a.m. and she called the family with the news, who now did not need to sit a long death watch, and the body was moved out and the bed changed for a new customer. All very orderly.

"But one day I walked into the living room and saw my father napping on the couch and my mother, the Angel of Death, standing over him and looking at him in a professional sort of way. Our cat sat on a chair watching her with concern in its eye. The cat knew. He never napped out in the open."

That was the laugh line, the wariness of the cat. And when the woman called her mother Snuff Queen, her mother said, "I just hope that when I get there, someone will do the same for me." More laughter.

A person should be horrified by young people laughing at euthanasia, but I only thought of Margie and that apartment on Erie Street in Minneapolis and how hard it was to keep focused when the object of your lust was laughing to beat the band. She played guitar and sang the blues and wrote her term paper on Joyce's Ulyssesand her laughter was like an aviary of exotic birds. We were young, we had no money, we possessed the world through sheer enthusiasm.

The world belongs to the young. Old pitchers get shelled one day and the next winter are released. Old writers go fallow and that's when people start giving them awards. Old politicians are locked up in think tanks. Old pop stars play casinos. We're marching toward the cliff and the middle-aged are pushing us and the young are pressing them. The angel is waiting with a cocktail. The poets told us to gather rosebuds while we could, that the flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying, and it turns out that they were right.

My friends discuss the upcoming election in Iran, and over my left shoulder young women chortle at the thought of geezers being launched into eternity by the Snuff Queen, and I remember the beautiful girl laughing and laughing and laughing. I was alarmed at how much she loved me and I neglected her for a whole summer and when I came back to school in the fall, she was gone gone gone. Ω

[Garrison Keillor is an author, storyteller, humorist, and creator of the weekly radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." The show began in 1974 as a live variety show on Minnesota Public Radio. In the 1980s "A Prairie Home Companion" became a pop culture phenomenon, with millions of Americans listening to Keillor's folksy tales of life in the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon, where (in Keillor's words) "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average." Keillor ended the show in 1987, and 1989 began a similar new radio show titled "American Radio Company of the Air." In 1993 he returned the show to its original name. Keillor also created the syndicated daily radio feature "A Writer's Almanac" in 1993. He has written for The New Yorker and is the author of several books, including Happy to Be Here (1990), Leaving Home (1992), Lake Wobegon Days (1995), and Good Poems for Hard Times (2005). Keillor's most recent book is a new Lake Wobegon novel, Liberty. His radio show inspired a 2006 movie, "A Prairie Home Companion," written by and starring Keillor and directed by Robert Altman. Keillor graduated (B.A., English) from the University of Minneosta in 1966. His signature sign-off on "The Writer's Almanac" is "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."]

Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc

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The CopyCobra Redux

The CopyCobra returned to the NY Fishwrap with a puff-piece about the POTUS and his pursuit of happiness with Mrs. POTUS and the POTUS-daughters. So, instead of dealing with her own sins, the CopyCobra joined the chorus of the Dumbos and pursuit of triviality. War crimes have been committed, the death and dying goes on in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (One anti-war talking head claimed that the civilian casualties in Iraq topped 1M!), and the CopyCobra prattles about presidential nights on the town and presidential tourism. Today's Op-Ed column did give ample credit to Richard Wolfe's reportage in Renegade, but the tabloid-fixation on ups-and-downs of the Obama marriage misses the point. The CopyCobra should have devoted her first Op-Ed column to a mediation on intellectual honesty. Pretending that the plagiarism elephant in the room has left the building is dishonest and sad. If this is a (fair & balanced) farewell to the CopyCobra until she steps up to the plate and focuses upon herself and plagiarism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Can The One Have Fun?
By Maureen Dowd

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The fun police are patrolling Pennsylvania Avenue.

Given the serious times, the chatter goes, should Barack Obama be allowed to enjoy date night with Michelle in New York, sightseeing in Paris, golf outings in D.C., not to mention doing a promotion for Conan O’Brien and a video cameo for Stephen Colbert’s first comedy show from Iraq?

With two wars and G.M. in bankruptcy proceedings, shouldn’t the president be glued to the grindstone, emulating W.’s gravity when he sacrificed golf in 2003 as the Iraq insurgency spread?

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” the former president explained later. “I think, you know, playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Actually, what sends the wrong signal is going to war with a phony justification, inadequate troop levels, insufficient armor, an inept Defense secretary and an inability to admit for years, deadly ones, that you needed counterinsurgency experts.

The right signal is Michelle and her daughters being charming ambassadors, “gobsmacking” the town, as a British tabloid put it, by scarfing down fish and chips at a London pub for £7.95 (about $13), like regular tourists.

As a taxpayer, I am most happy to contribute to domestic and international date nights. As Arthur Schlesinger noted in his diaries, the White House tends to drive its occupants nuts. So some respite from the pressure is clearly a healthy thing. Not as much respite as W. took, bicycling and vacationing through all the disasters that President Obama is now stuck fixing — spending a total of 490 days in the tumbleweed isolation of Crawford and rarely deigning to sightsee as he traveled the world.

Some White House officials fretted that the Obamas’ Marine One and Gulfstream magic-carpet ride to dinner in Greenwich Village and a play on Broadway was too showy. Others thought it helped show a softer side of the often dispassionate Obama.

Interestingly, Dr. No, Dick Cheney, declined to tut-tut with other Republicans, saying “I don’t know why not,” when he was asked about the propriety of the president’s getaway to Broadway. A far more mature response than Senator Chuck Grassley’s nit-twit tweets grumbling about the president urging progress on health care “while u sightseeing in Paris.”

I loved the “Pretty Woman” romance of the New York tableau, the president, who had not lived an entitled life where he could afford such lavish gestures, throwing off his tie and whisking his wife, in a flirty black cocktail dress, to sip martinis in Manhattan, as Sasha hung over a White House balcony and called out goodbye.

When the president and first lady walked to their seats in the Belasco for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” the theater-goers went nuts. And why not?

What a relief to have an urbane, cultivated, curious president who’s out and about, engaged in the world. Not dangerously detached, as W. was, or darkly stewing like Cheney. Not hanging with the Rat Pack like J.F.K. or getting bored and up to mischief like Bill Clinton.

It was lame of critics on Capitol Hill to carp that the Obamas could have taken in a play in D.C. I’m a native, but it’s not the same. And it’s nice to see them tending to their marriage. According to Richard Wolffe in Renegade, his new book about the Obama campaign, it has taken effort to get the relationship this strong.

“She hated the failed race for Congress in 2000, and their marriage was strained by the time their youngest daughter, Sasha, was born a year later,” Wolffe writes. “There was little conversation and even less romance. She was angry at his selfishness and careerism; he thought she was cold and ungrateful. Even as he ran for the United States Senate in 2004, she still harbored very mixed feelings about her husband’s love of politics. ... So she had played no part in Barack’s previous contests and preferred to keep her distance.”

Wolffe limns what those of us who traveled with Obama could see: He was often grumpy on the campaign. He missed his family. He disdained what he saw as superficial, point-scoring conventions of politics, like debates and macho put-downs and public noshing. The Chicago smarty-pants was a Michael Jordan clutch player who grew bored if he was not challenged.

Being president, by contrast, suits him much better. He has not lapsed into his old ambivalence. He is intellectually engaged by sculpting history. The trellis of hideous problems is a challenge that lures him to be powerfully concentrated. And, as his aides say, he loves living above the family store.

Mixing play with intense work is not only a good mental health strategy; it’s a good way to show the world that American confidence and cool — and Cary Grant romantic flair — still thrive.

Date on and tee it up, Mr. President. It’s O.K. if they’re teed off. Ω

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Her second book followed in 2005: Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide. Dowd earned a bachelor's degree from DC's Catholic University in 1973.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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