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If God and
Barry McCaffrey
can't figure it out, why should anybody else? The only practical effect of
prohibition is an increase in demand. The latest victim of this unfortunate
principle is California lieutenant governor Cruz Bustamante, who last week
blurted out
a certain awful word
(two syllables, rhymes with "rejigger") during a Black History Month address. The hapless
official professes himself baffled by his own slip of the tongue, and despite
demands
by his opportunistic opponents that he "explain himself," we believe him.
By way of both instruction and in-house log rolling, we suggest a fresh
reading of James Bong's
fine dissertation on
this matter, and perhaps a timely reminder that right-thinking people
everywhere are at this very moment walking around with a burning desire
to shriek the n-word, and that this desire only increases depending on
the inappropriateness of the circumstances. This isn't because of any urge to
provoke or mundane racism, but simply because you're not allowed to
say it. In the case of Bustamante,
a lifelong liberal whose "long history of civil rights activism" has pretty
clearly gone up in flames, the situation — up on the dais, giving a longwinded
speech to the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists — is pretty much off
the inappropriateness scale, which makes his slip not so much surprising
as inevitable. The tale has some of the exquisite psychic pain of that dream
where you're back in high school and buck naked, and we suggest Bustamante
use it to prove that in fact he is the least bigoted of men, that he
works even harder at being a non-racist than most people. Because the more
forcefully you resist The Word, the more powerfully it will recrudesce. And
judging by the depths of his current humiliation, we're guessing Bustamante must
have a lifetime of good works behind him.
A strange call came from beyond the fourth wall Friday. Four female
newscasters who strip while reading the news, weather, and sports were
asking viewers to join their broadcast team. The first help-wanted ad to
include multimedia nudity came from
the Naked News, which bills itself
as "The program with nothing to hide."
"It took training, patience — and
courage — to get to where we are now," one of the four unclothed
newscasters announced. "And you know what? It was worth it." Last month
the Toronto Star reported the year-old site was receiving four million
visitors a month, spreading its unique brand of media
criticism with cheerful Canadian aplomb. (Director Elliott Shulman
claimed with a straight face to the Star that the show was about self-expression.) The successful job applicant will replace pregnant
sports-anchor Holly Westin when she goes on maternity leave, though Westin
will gamely continue broadcasting up until her departure date. Sensitive
to charges of sexism, Friday's call for "fit articulate gals" was even
accompanied by hints that they're planning an equivalent offering with
naked male newscasters. While it's difficult to puncture the Canadians'
earnest good will, unintended irony crept into the naked
anchorwoman's closing remarks about Timothy McVeigh's request for a
televised execution:
"In this day and age there are no martyrs, media is
the new church, and most will sell their soul for a few moments in the
spotlight.
"I'm Victoria Sinclair...."
While we're tempted to leave the last word to Ms. Sinclair, it's a little
disappointing that McVeigh's request for a televised execution wasn't
given more serious consideration. After families of the Oklahoma City bomber's
victims requested a
closed-circuit pain-per-view of the event, McVeigh countered with an
open letter to The Sunday Oklahoman, writing, "It has ... been said
that all of Oklahoma was a victim of the bombing. Can all of Oklahoma
watch?" Rather than seeing that as a morbid response to the victims'
equally morbid request, family members
instantly decried
McVeigh's counteroffer as delusional. Strange, since
nobody thought him delusional when he requested that his execution be
moved up because he was tired of life and wanted to die. There's a
sad pop psychology going back and forth here instead of actual law.
It's OK for McVeigh to die as he pleases, OK for the victims to sit
in the crypt with him via TV, but it's the height of bad taste and
egomania for him to suggest that the results of state policy be
run on broadcast TV.
"Are citizens
going to see this sitting in a bar?" asked Tom Kight, whose daughter,
Frankie Merrell, died in the explosion. Yes, they would, and they'd
cheer and toast his death
the same way execution watchers routinely do
outside prison walls when famous killers are put down, and no doubt
will when McVeigh dies. Somewhere along the line in
death penalty politics the issue stopped being about the value of human
life and simply became a question of how we use execution to convey messages. "What about the
people who follow him, the right-wing anti-government people?" said
Kight, "I think Tim would like to go out a martyr." So, is this bit
of Must See TV for the victims' families, to deter crime, or to make
McVeigh a martyr to his supporters? That's too much reality TV
for even today's saturated viewers. It may just be that while watching a man
die would initially go over with audiences, the lack of Tribal Council-style
suspense and the ordeal of having to think about the morality of it all
would send audiences back to NYPD Blue and Law and Order,
which manage to wrap up their legal and moral quandaries a bit more neatly.
A shrewd producer, however, might still find a way to add some zest to the
deadening ritual of
the final round and dissuade McVeigh's would-be acolytes: an eleventh-hour
visit from McVeigh's childhood pal
"Father Jerry," who convinces
the Sooner State Sicko to break down and bawl like a yellow coward as he walks
the last mile.
We've known for years that the Internet is a fertile breeding
ground for obsessions — the more minute and personal, the
better. And what finer obsession than last weekend's hot date? Online
dating isn't the killer app of Internet romance — online
stalking is. The bicoastal elite is just now waking up to the
possibilities of looking up your latest paramour's name in the Celestial Encyclopedia.
Suck first wrote about this phenomenon nearly five years ago, in
Justine's seminal "Nitecrawler." The search engine back then was AltaVista, but
everything else was the same. In their race to get current to the half-decade-old
trend of running your hot squeeze's name through a search engine,
though, some writers are getting a little sloppy. Sharp-eyed David
Blum reports in
Jim Romenesko's MediaNews that a SoCal report of an online search for
a "brainy and adventurous guy" with a thick
head of hair was remarkably similar to an earlier
Gotham tale of
a Net lookup of a "handsome, smart" fellow with a thick head
of hair. Perhaps our heads are even thicker than those fellows' —
but if you ask us, both stories are remarkably similar to
Nitecrawler's tale.
We were curious what our old pal Justine
made of all this. While she had no catty remarks for her arriviste
imitators, she did say that, as in 1996, she didn't hold much truck
with running your romances through a search engine. Besides, Justine
tells us, she doesn't have to let her fingers do the searching; the
names of her high-school flames
just show up, uninvited, in the dotcom-obituary message
boards.
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