It was such a simpler time, that summer of 2001. Remember it? That last season of America’s (cyclical) innocence shimmers in the memory, sorta like those gauzy images of lovebirds Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby – images so blurry they make you wonder if you need to adjust the focus on your TV. Ah, for those halcyon days! … when the only Washington story most of us cared about was the fate of Chandra Levy, and the most pressing topic on George Bush’s plate was stem cells (because he sure as hell wasn’t paying attention to al Qaeda).
Back then, the Taliban were a nasty band of fundamentalist cusses about whom we knew rather little – apart from the facts that they oppressed their women, didn’t care much for poppy growing, and were somehow in cahoots with that bin Laden guy we’d been hearing about. That summer the biggest Taliban-related news was a minor international uproar over their peculiar decision to use small explosives and machine-gun fire to attack a pair of massive Buddha statues that had been carved out of Afghan cliffs a couple millennia earlier. Meanwhile, a fascinating story emerged (I don’t remember where) about the last two remaining Jews in Kabul, and their daily struggle to observe their cultural traditions despite the Taliban’s strict enforcement of Sharia laws concerning everything from beard length to public worship.
It’s a story that has shownremarkable legsthrough the years, partly because of this juicy detail: The two aging men were living in the ruins of a synagogue … and they weren’t speaking to one another! Their saga has spawned at least two darkly comic plays: My Brother’s Keeper played in Edinburgh and London in 2006, while The Last Two Jews of Kabul premiered off-off-Broadway last year. Much earlier than that, during those happy-go-lucky days of summer 2001, that first article had inspired me to write what remains my one and only original limerick. So if you’ll forgive my mispronunciation of the Afghan capital…
There was just one Jew left in Kabul
His beard shaven, by government rule
But he was much too distinct
In his lower precinct
So the Taliban shot off his tool(more…)
Ever since Al Franken parked his rear end in the Democrats’ 60th U.S. Senate seat, the conventional wisdom has held that no matter how much of a fuss the Republicans kicked up this summer and fall, some form of healthcare legislation was bound to reach President Obama’s desk. Taking the midterm election of 1994 as a template for what happens when Democrats spend a year on healthcare and don’t pass anything, party leaders have insisted that such a fiasco must not be repeated, no matter how mediocre a bill eventually emerges. So now that the House has wrapped up its business – taking what was already a warm bucket of piss and vomiting all over it with the Stupak amendment – a nation that not-so-narrowly voted for this agenda turns its lonely eyes to the Senate and screams, “Could you people please just get on with it?”
And the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest deliberative body” responds, “Not so fast.” The House bill is “dead on arrival,” says Lindsay Graham. “I won’t let the public option come to a vote,” says Joe Lieberman. “We’re ready to take the whole Democratic Party down, rather than vote for a package that might cost us a small percentage of voters in our backwater states,” say Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln. (Or, at least, they may as well be saying it.) No one at this moment has a clue how the Senate will proceed, or when – not even its majority leader, Harry Reid, who was against the public option before he was for it, and may soon be against it again.
But you know what? That’s all OK, because I can’t imagine there’s anybody out there who is actually happy with the House bill. Truth be told, there may be a grand total of 43 such folks – those being the Democrats who voted for the bill after also voting for the Stupak amendment, which bars the inclusion of abortion coverage in any health-insurance plan that participates in the new purchasing exchanges. Already we’ve seen a similar number of progressive Dems insist they won’t vote for final passage of the bill if the abortion measure isn’t stripped out in conference. But even if both chambers eventually agree on a bill, it will undoubtedly cost too much, cover too few (and make some pay too much to buy in), start too late (the new exchanges are delayed til 2013, simply to keep the bill’s 10-year cost projections down), and be positively loathed by far too many.
In other words, Obama and Congress have screwed the pooch completely on this bill. They should pass it anyway. (more…)
We may not have John Edwards to kick around anymore – though that hasn’t stopped us from putting the occasional boot into his backside, has it? – but he did leave us with a paradigm that remains useful in surveying the political landscape circa November 2009. Forget, for the moment, Edwards’ rhetoric about the rich and the poor, and focus instead on the two wildly disparate narratives about the nation’s politics that have emerged over the past 12 months. On one side are those are still living in Bamalot, who see slow but steady progress toward fixing enormous problems in the economy, health care and foreign policy; on the other are those who see nothing but dollar bills flying out the windows of the Capitol. On one side are those who remain quietly, but fiercely proud of what America accomplished last autumn; on the other are those who loudly trumpet their conviction (or who put up with people who remain convinced) that the president himself is not an American.
On Tuesday, in a couple of states, one side sat contentedly on their asses and did nothing; the other harnessed themselves into an angry, energized mini-electorate that drove to the polls and turned their governors’ mansions from blue to red.
There was something deeply ironic about HBO’s decision to debut its new documentary, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday evening. At the same hour on every news channel, a debate was raging as to whether Obama’s “movement for change” had hit a roadblock with the Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. But over on pay cable, it was Decision ’08 all over again as the Edward Norton-produced doc replayed the goings-on behind the scenes of Obama’s primary and general-election victories – and portrayed his opponents as little more than flies to be swatted along the path to the inevitable.
So, yes, the dichotomy was ironic – but it was also a nice metaphor for Tuesday’s outcome. Obama’s voters, feeling like they did their job last year and remaining pretty happy with the way things have gone since then, stayed home and watched TV, while the unhappy folks dragged their butts to the polls and changed the status quo. Such is democracy in America – particularly in these off-off-year elections, when the voters of New Jersey and (particularly) Virginia love to send Bronx cheers to the party in power. (more…)
My apologies to anyone who’s been waiting with bated breath for me to wrap up this series – is there any such person out there? I left off in early August, with my review of songs that failed to wriggle their way past Mariah Carey and/or Boyz II Men to reach the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 during the ’90s. Since then I’ve faced the same trepidation I had last year while surveying the Worst Number One Songs of the ’00s – namely, the fact that I feel less than eminently qualified to pass judgment on the Auto-Tune Era. Finally, though, as Woody Harrelson puts it so eloquently in Zombieland, I decided it was time to “nut up or shut up,” so here we are.
Fortunately, I’ve got the artist kicking off our countdown to push me forward, and remind me why I took up this six-part (so far) endeavor in the first place. As always, I’ll conclude with a list of some other #2s from the decade.
11. “Work It,” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott. I don’t particularly care for this track, but there are a couple reasons why it’s a perfect launching pad for this column. For one, it represents a key step in the evolution of hip-hop toward raunchy themes and racy lyrics. Because Missy was as nasty as the boyz of her era, she absolved the trend of any misogynist stigma, and it was a quick step from “Work It” to the strip-club hip-hop soul that’s become so prevalent lately. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily … though when even Jordin Sparks is singing about “the club,” maybe the moment is over, huh? Anyway, the other key accomplishment of “Work It” was its 10-week stay at #2 — tied with Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You” (which we celebrated here) for the longest runner-up run in chart history. And here’s where we’ve gotta give Missy her props, because she’s got the stones to admit that only reaching #2 with her biggest hit kinda sucked. “I just wanted to die those ten weeks,” she said of being blocked by Eminem’s smash “Lose Yourself” through the winter of ’03. “I mean, it wasn’t cool.” (more…)
Now is the autumn of our discontent … at least for us Los Angeles baseball fans. Last night the Dodgers were polished off by the ruthless Phillies, their forever-teetering staff of pitchers finally crumbling in the face of Ryan Howard and that goddamned Victorino. Tonight the Angels may suffer the same fate – and even if they survive long enough to fly back east for the weekend, the Yankees will have their $161 million man waiting.
Which $161 million man? Now, there’s a question that could only refer to the Yankees. The one I’m talking about is CC Sabathia, the team’s most recent nine-figure pitching purchase, who has already shut the Angels down twice in this ALCS. But I could also be talking about first baseman Mark Teixeira, whom the Yankees plucked off the Angels’ roster last offseason for $180 million and who has repeatedly robbed his former teammates in the field this week (though his offensive numbers are pathetic). Of course, I might otherwise be talking about Derek Jeter, who’s nearing the end of his own $189 million contract. And as for Alex Rodriguez … well, he’ll earn $161 million in about the time it takes me to finish this column.
At least A-Rod is earning his salary (for once) this postseason. Still, like most baseball fans who don’t root for the Yankees, I have a hard time watching the Bombers without becoming queasy from the tsunami of dollar signs. In fact, Sabathia, Teixeira and A-Rod have ceased to function for me as human beings; their uniform numbers may as well be replaced with contract numbers – 161, 180, and 275, respectively. (Jeter gets a pass, since he came up through the farm system back in the ’90s, but the mind reels at the thought of the Yankees’ other free-agent acquisitions this decade – including tonight’s starting pitcher, number 82, otherwise known as A.J. Burnett.) If you add up the number of dollars the Steinbrenners have committed to their Big Three free agents through the end of Sabathia’s contract in 2016 – a total of $616 million – you get a number larger than the expected cumulative payrolls of 18 of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams over that span, even accounting for inflation. (more…)
That’s right, folks, the most disturbing Halloween EVER! From now until Halloween, the Popdose staff are going to be thumbing through their record collections in search of the music that gives them the worst case of the heebie-jeebies. In this installment, Jon Cummings reminisces about Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells.” —Anthony Hansen
Sometimes I wonder if kids today are bothered in the slightest by the sorts of things that used to freak me out when I was a boy. For example, when I was 9 I spent several months in what I now refer to as my “Hitler phase,” when – fueled by the Nazi-horror stories imparted by a creepy friend, and spooked by a coffee-table book called Sieg Heil! that I had checked out from the local library — I frequently conjured the very real image of Der Führer lurking behind my darkened bedroom door. (He didn’t have to hold a machete – the thought of that moustache alone was enough to make me wet myself.) Those months were probably the only time I was thankful to share a room with my older brother, because I couldn’t stand to be in the dark by myself. I often found myself running at a full sprint to the front of the house to escape Adolf’s clutches, and those were the days when my mom would stomp through the house, snapping off lights I had left on and muttering something about owning the electric company.
At about that same time, during the fall of 1975, my friend Kevin brought over a single he had snatched from his sister’s collection. We knew it simply as “The Exorcist,” but of course it was an edited version of the “first movement” (A/K/A side one) of Mike Oldfield’s debut LP Tubular Bells, excerpted for use as the theme to William Friedkin’s film version of William Peter Blatty’s religious-horror novel. The single, officially known as “Tubular Bells (Theme from The Exorcist),” had reached the Top 10 almost two years before, but its success had predated by just a few months my headlong leap into pop-radio obsession during the fall of ’74. And as a 9-year-old, I wasn’t yet familiar with the R-rated film.
A note to our readers: Former Popdose contributor John Hughes’ departure for bigger and better things has left a rather big hole where his “Lost in the ’70s/’80s/’90s” columns used to be. Fortunately, John gave his blessing for the rest of us to take up his fallen standard, and we’ve pledged to do our best to live up to the brilliance of his work. So without further ado…
When is a rave review also a kiss of death? Perhaps when it’s 1987, and the “critic” is Margaret Thatcher.
It’s pretty well established by now that politics and pop music are uncomfortable bedfellows, at best. Particularly in the three decades since both Great Britain and the United States fell to their respective conservative parties, most attempts to link politicians with pop have been ham-fisted embarrassments – no matter the party or the pop star. As a columnist for the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper put it a few years ago, “Thinking about a politician listening to rock music is like imagining your parents having sex: you not only lose all respect for them, it puts you off the whole concept.”
In that same 2004 article the columnist, Alexis Petridus, bemoaned the attempts of leading Tory politicians to boost their hip factor by variously proclaiming their admiration for the Scissor Sisters, Dido, Jarvis Cocker and even Meat Loaf. Petridus suggested that if history were any guide, those acts might be doomed to suffer what he called “the Curse of the Thrashing Doves.” (more…)
Now here’s a fast-moving story: Just a week ago, word leaked that Rush Limbaugh was part of an ownership group hoping to bid on the woebegone St. Louis Rams. Within three business days, the head of the players union, a current owner and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had all come forward with essentially the same message: “Like hell you will!” By yesterday, ESPN had confirmed that Rush was being dropped from the bidding group. And just like that…
Well, what, exactly? What has been accomplished with this brief minuet of misplaced ambition and swift smackdown? For one thing, Rush’s media profile clearly has bumped up an extra tick, as if he needed it – though he’s clearly sought it, considering his eagerness to sit down for an interview this week with the sworn enemy of all conservatives, the NBC/MSNBC juggernaut. (Maybe he felt the sticky, Nyquil-inebriated breath of Time cover boy Glenn Beck down his neck.) Meanwhile, the NFL suddenly – and, for the most part, unwittingly – has found itself politicized, with the usual crackpots insisting over the past week that they would never watch pro football again if Rush got the team (or if he didn’t, depending on whether the pot was cracked on the left or right side). “I will NEVER go to a game OF ANY TEAM, WATCH ON TV, OR LISTEN ON RADIO to one more NFL game EVER,” wrote one typical rantboy, apparently convinced he could bring down the monolith all on his own. Just in case you were wondering which side this all-caps screamer was on, his message twice dared the NFL to “exhibit bias” against Rush’s “equal right” to buy a team. (Thus we arrive at a third result, this one inevitable: Conservatives now have one more reason to feel aggrieved, and one more excuse for twisting the language of civil liberties to suit their agitation.)
All those outcomes are ephemeral – we’ll forget about them as soon as the next temporary outrage presents itself. But we’re also left with a lesson in resume building – more specifically, a primer in careers that don’t function particularly well as precursors for (and may even serve as disqualifiers for) other careers. Indeed, this episode may well serve as a What Color Is My Parachute? for hyperpartisans on both sides of the political divide. (Note to Rush: the colors of your parachute apparently aren’t blue and gold.) (more…)
As a wired citizen of our not-terribly-United States, you’ve no doubt received your share of cranky, mass-distributed partisan e-mails. I get them all the time, and my favorites (a phrase I use here ironically) are the ones that purport to show the differences between two viewpoints by offering the best possible description of one side and the worst possible slander of the other. The preponderance of these seem to come from the right side of our political discourse – the side that’s much better at name-calling and manipulating good ideas to sound like terrible ones. (But there I go again…)
One might think I have better things to do than take personal offense when one of these anonymous hatefests appears in my inbox … but, no, I can never seem to let these things pass without a response. Sometimes I offer a reasoned debunking of whatever bilge is contained in the diatribe, but too often I crank up the flamethrower and launch a torrent of my own uncivil rantings. The latter was the case recently, and as soon as I hit “send” I regretted my contribution to the coarsening of the national dialogue … even if it was just between myself and a friend.
And then I thought it might be interesting to conduct a bit of a thought experiment. (Actually, it’s just a cut-and-paste experiment, but whatever.) What if we compared only the “best” views of both sides, and ignored the “worst” views? Might that reflect the true essence of the body politic? Or, alternatively, is a comparison of the “worsts” more representative of how blue sees red, and vice versa? (more…)
All the dictionaries in my house are rather old, but I’m pretty sure the following definitions (from the Second College Edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary) still apply:
capitalism: the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution … are privately owned and operated for profit
democracy: government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives
Among the many, many problems with Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, perhaps the most basic is his apparent inability to distinguish between economic and political systems. His conclusion – one he repeated at length on Bill Maher’s show last week – is that we need to “abolish capitalism and replace it with democracy.” It’s a populist idea, to be sure, intended to rouse the (liberal, upper-middle-class) rabble to head directly from the theater to the local Home Depot for torches and pitchforks. But no matter what Moore actually meant – and what he meant is that we need to limit the overwhelming influence that corporations and financial elites currently wield over American life – his message is inevitably lost (at least amongst his decently educated audience) in his nonsensical juxtaposition of capitalism and democracy as mutually exclusive.
Sadly, little else about the scattershot Capitalism: A Love Story makes much sense, either. The film is a jumble of macro- and micro-economic diatribes that fails almost completely to show the link between the collapses and bailouts on Wall Street and the current struggles on Main Street. Moore wants desperately to make us see that link, and to get us angry about it, but he gets no closer than anyone else has to illuminating the complex financial instruments (derivatives, credit default swaps, etc., etc.) that played a major role in the banking catastrophe – or to showing us how they affect the lives of ordinary people through foreclosures, job losses and the like. (more…)
Back then, the Taliban were a nasty band of fundamentalist cusses about whom we knew rather little – apart from the facts that they oppressed their women, didn’t care much for poppy growing, and were somehow in cahoots with that bin Laden guy we’d been hearing about. That summer the biggest Taliban-related news was a minor international uproar over their peculiar decision to use small explosives and machine-gun fire to attack a pair of massive Buddha statues that had been carved out of Afghan cliffs a couple millennia earlier. Meanwhile, a fascinating story emerged (I don’t remember where) about the last two remaining Jews in Kabul, and their daily struggle to observe their cultural traditions despite the Taliban’s strict enforcement of Sharia laws concerning everything from beard length to public worship.
But you know what? That’s all OK, because I can’t imagine there’s anybody out there who is actually happy with the House bill. Truth be told, there may be a grand total of 43 such folks – those being the Democrats who voted for the bill after also voting for the Stupak amendment, which bars the inclusion of abortion coverage in any health-insurance plan that participates in the new purchasing exchanges. Already we’ve seen a similar number of progressive Dems insist they won’t vote for final passage of the bill if the abortion measure isn’t stripped out in conference. But even if both chambers eventually agree on a bill, it will undoubtedly cost too much, cover too few (and make some pay too much to buy in), start too late (the new exchanges are delayed til 2013, simply to keep the bill’s 10-year cost projections down), and be positively loathed by far too many.
There was something deeply ironic about HBO’s decision to debut its new documentary, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday evening. At the same hour on every news channel, a debate was raging as to whether Obama’s “movement for change” had hit a roadblock with the Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. But over on pay cable, it was Decision ’08 all over again as the Edward Norton-produced doc replayed the goings-on behind the scenes of Obama’s primary and general-election victories – and portrayed his opponents as little more than flies to be swatted along the path to the inevitable.
My apologies to anyone who’s been waiting with bated breath for me to wrap up 
Which $161 million man? Now, there’s a question that could only refer to the Yankees. The one I’m talking about is CC Sabathia, the team’s most recent nine-figure pitching purchase, who has already shut the Angels down twice in this ALCS. But I could also be talking about first baseman Mark Teixeira, whom the Yankees plucked off the Angels’ roster last offseason for $180 million and who has repeatedly robbed his former teammates in the field this week (though his offensive numbers are pathetic). Of course, I might otherwise be talking about Derek Jeter, who’s nearing the end of his own $189 million contract. And as for Alex Rodriguez … well, he’ll earn $161 million in about the time it takes me to finish this column.
Sometimes I wonder if kids today are bothered in the slightest by the sorts of things that used to freak me out when I was a boy. For example, when I was 9 I spent several months in what I now refer to as my “Hitler phase,” when – fueled by the Nazi-horror stories imparted by a creepy friend, and spooked by a coffee-table book called 
It’s pretty well established by now that politics and pop music are uncomfortable bedfellows, at best. Particularly in the three decades since both Great Britain and the United States fell to their respective conservative parties, most attempts to link politicians with pop have been ham-fisted embarrassments – no matter the party or the pop star. As a columnist for the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper put it 
Well, what, exactly? What has been accomplished with this brief minuet of misplaced ambition and swift smackdown? For one thing, Rush’s media profile clearly has bumped up an extra tick, as if he needed it – though he’s clearly sought it, considering his eagerness to sit down for an interview this week with the sworn enemy of all conservatives, the NBC/MSNBC juggernaut. (Maybe he felt the sticky, Nyquil-inebriated breath of Time cover boy Glenn Beck down his neck.) Meanwhile, the NFL suddenly – and, for the most part, unwittingly – has found itself politicized, with the usual crackpots insisting over the past week that they would never watch pro football again if Rush got the team (or if he didn’t, depending on whether the pot was cracked on the left or right side). “I will NEVER go to a game OF ANY TEAM, WATCH ON TV, OR LISTEN ON RADIO to one more NFL game EVER,” wrote one typical rantboy, apparently convinced he could bring down the monolith all on his own. Just in case you were wondering which side this all-caps screamer was on, his message twice dared the NFL to “exhibit bias” against Rush’s “equal right” to buy a team. (Thus we arrive at a third result, this one inevitable: Conservatives now have one more reason to feel aggrieved, and one more excuse for twisting the language of civil liberties to suit their agitation.)
One might think I have better things to do than take personal offense when one of these anonymous hatefests appears in my inbox … but, no, I can never seem to let these things pass without a response. Sometimes I offer a reasoned debunking of whatever bilge is contained in the diatribe, but too often I crank up the flamethrower and launch a torrent of my own uncivil rantings. The latter was the case recently, and as soon as I hit “send” I regretted my contribution to the coarsening of the national dialogue … even if it was just between myself and a friend.
Among the many, many problems with Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, perhaps the most basic is his apparent inability to distinguish between economic and political systems. His conclusion – one he repeated at length on Bill Maher’s show last week – is that we need to “abolish capitalism and replace it with democracy.” It’s a populist idea, to be sure, intended to rouse the (liberal, upper-middle-class) rabble to head directly from the theater to the local Home Depot for torches and pitchforks. But no matter what Moore actually meant – and what he meant is that we need to limit the overwhelming influence that corporations and financial elites currently wield over American life – his message is inevitably lost (at least amongst his decently educated audience) in his nonsensical juxtaposition of capitalism and democracy as mutually exclusive.