A nation mourned Wednesday night, as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration, announced his retirement from the network. Though it’s still unclear which nation is in mourning, experts have conclusively ruled out Mexico.

According to the Associated Press, the controversial newsman “angered CNN management this summer by pressing questions about President Obama’s birth site after CNN reporters determined there was no issue.”

I myself was skeptical of the president’s birthplace until he drank a domestic beer — Bud Light — at the July 30 “beer summit.” Then I remembered that Anheuser-Busch, the makers of Bud Light, sold their company last year to InBev, a Belgian company. Thanks to CNN’s shortsightedness, we may never find out if InBev is secretly run by Kenyan expatriates.

This isn’t the first time Dobbs has left CNN. He was one of its original anchors back in 1980 when it debuted, overseeing financial news and hosting Moneyline. But in April of ‘99, after being reprimanded by the network’s then-president, Rick Kaplan, for cutting away from a speech by President Bill Clinton on the Columbine shootings, Dobbs announced that he was departing CNN, saying he wanted to focus on a new website he’d founded, Space.com, because in space no one can hear you call your boss an idiot.

(I was working at CNN in a bottom-rung position back in 1999, and I would bet money that Kaplan’s voice, which combined the omnipotence of God with the volume of a T. Rex, can be heard in space. If I remember correctly, he was also nine feet tall.)

Kaplan left CNN the following year, clearing the way for Dobbs to return in 2001. Moneyline was renamed Lou Dobbs Moneyline, which became Lou Dobbs Tonight in 2003, which almost became Lou Dobbs’s America Is for Lou Dobbs and Lou Dobbs’s Friends Only, So If Your Name Isn’t Lou Dobbs or You’re Not One of His Friends, Stay the Hell Out in 2007.

The exit of Dobbs — whose book Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas can be purchased at Borders, naturally — is a big blow for CNN. Earlier this year its sister network, Headline News, lost Glenn Beck to Fox News Channel, leaving CNN without any middle-aged conservatives who dye their hair a color I like to call “faded doorknob.” The dye jobs gave the ultra-right-wing anchors a youthful look, which some might amend to “a Hitler Youth-ful look,” but not me. I think these guys are just acting.

Remember when Bill O’Reilly was a guest on The Colbert Report in 2007 and said, “I’m not a tough guy … This is all an act”? He was admitting that on TV he plays a “version” of himself. (Colbert’s reply: “If you’re an act, then what am I?”)

Similarly, when President Obama says he was born in Hawaii, he’s speaking as a version of the man who was actually born in the deepest, darkest, and therefore most foreign part of Kenya. And when Glenn Beck portrays himself as an unfunny, emotionally unstable bigot on TV and radio five days a week, that’s merely a smokescreen for the gentle, mild-mannered teddy bear that lies beneath.

Or the devil. I haven’t decided yet. But either way, he’s making it work for him.

Besides, as the New York Times reported last week, he’s a big supporter of fiction, especially political thrillers. Everyone enjoys make-believe, particularly claims that the president has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” as Beck said on the July 28 edition of Fox and Friends. It cost him a bunch of advertisers, but what a great racially charged premise for a beach read!

The trend of actors playing versions of themselves in comedic films has become very popular in the last decade, including John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich (1999), Elisabeth Shue in Hamlet 2 (2008), Neil Patrick Harris in the two Harold and Kumar movies, and Topher Grace, Bruce Willis, and Julia Roberts as Tess Ocean as Julia Roberts in Ocean’s Twelve (2004). Plus, on TV you’ve got Chris Kattan in this year’s IFC miniseries Bollywood Hero, Larry David and his various real-life celebrity friends on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Matt LeBlanc and musician Rick Springfield, who are set to play “themselves” on Showtime’s upcoming series Episodes and Californication, respectively.

There’s also Comedy Central’s Michael & Michael Have Issues. One of its creators and stars, Michael Ian Black, recently described the show-within-a-show concept to the Onion AV Club: “Although we’re playing ourselves, I still very much feel like I’m playing a character, and it’s the character of myself. What that means is, I have to understand who I am — and you can substitute ‘my character’ for ‘I’ — in the context of this television show, and in the context of this television relationship. So the conversation that [costar and cocreator Michael] Showalter and I are always having is, ‘Would I do this here?’ That character is still evolving. Any project has its own voice, and you have to find that voice.”

Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs found their voices a while ago. Now it’s time for CNN to find a new one. (Forget placeholder John King. With that square jaw of his, he should be protecting the world from supervillains, not interviewing pundits.)

May I suggest myself? Yes, I may, because I’m pretty sure the Cable News Network still owes me some backpay from ten years ago. I may not have hair the color of a faded doorknob — in fact I have no hair whatsoever these days — but what I lack in locks, I make up for with a surplus of “version”-al technique. Here are a few of the questions I get asked by readers on a regular basis:

Q: Is Aimiee really your girlfriend?
A: Yes.

Q: But why would any woman with even a shred of self-respect put up with a guy like you?
A: I don’t know. Maybe you should ask her yourself.

Q: Okay. Where is she?
A: Sorry, she can’t come to the computer right now.

Q: I think you’re making all of this up.
A: No. I swear I’m not. Except for these “questions,” of course.

Q: Wait. You’re saying I’m not really the one asking these questions? That I’m not in control of what I’m saying?
A: Exactly.

Q: My head just exploded.
A: Good, because I really need to get back to this column.

So, as I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself, I enjoy all the mirrors in the funhouse. But I promise I won’t be hurt, CNN, if you decide I’m not a big enough “name.” May I suggest an alternate option to replace Lou Dobbs?

He’s a conservative. (Yay!) He’s also a foreigner. (Boo!)

He loved President Bush. (Yay!) He called President Obama “some tanned guy.” (Uh …)

He’s a billionaire. (Yay!) In 2006 he said, “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone.” (Hold on a second …)

He produced the 1992 film Folks!, starring beloved Oscar winner Don Ameche. (Never seen it — but yay! Old people good, death panels bad!) It was a slapstick comedy that derived most of its laughs from Ameche’s character having Alzheimer’s. (What the…?)

After 9/11 he said, “The West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with another civilization, Islam, firmly entrenched where it was 1,400 years ago.” (Wow. Well, at least he didn’t compare himself to Jesus that time.)

Earlier this year he said he would deploy 300,000 soldiers in the streets of his country to combat crime, but when asked by a reporter if that number would be enough to prevent women from being raped, he replied, ”You can’t consider deploying a force that would be [large enough] to prevent the risk … We would have to have so many soldiers because our women are so beautiful.” (Aww, that’s kinda sweet– wait, no it’s not!)

And he once told the following joke in front of an audience: “An AIDS patient asks his doctor whether the sand treatment prescribed him will do any good. ‘No’, the doctor replies, ‘but you will get accustomed to living under the earth.’” (Who is this monster?!)

He’s Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi! Who knows what’s really going through the man’s mind at any given moment, but you certainly can’t say any of his various versions are boring.

Right now the 72-year-old politician and business tycoon is a little busy dealing with criminal charges of corruption and tax fraud back home, not to mention a sex scandal involving prostitutes and young women. But once his dance card is empty again, I’m sure he’d love a crack at his own op-ed show here in the States, where he’ll find a whole rainbow of people to offend.

Berlusconi started out as a cruise ship entertainer, and although Dobbs says he wants to concentrate on “advocacy journalism” in the next phase of his career, he could easily end up adrift if he doesn’t work on his people skills.

What’s that saying? “Immigrants take the jobs no one else wants”? Dobbs may find himself in rough waters when suddenly even the immigrants decide nothing’s better than something.

The following piece originally appeared as an entry in Popdose’s Most Disturbing Halloween EVER! series.

“Everyday People” entered the Billboard Top 40 on January 4, 1969. Six weeks later it was the number-one song in the country, holding onto the top spot for an entire month. The lead single from Sly & the Family Stone’s upcoming album Stand!, it espoused “different strokes for different folks,” with the group’s leader, Sly Stone, assuring listeners that “I am no better and neither are you / We are the same whatever we do.”

Later that year the “psychedelic soul” band from San Francisco — featuring black, white, male, and female members — played the Woodstock festival, taking the stage at three in the morning on August 17 with inspirational anthems like “You Can Make It If You Try” and “I Want to Take You Higher,” which quickly moved the predawn crowd out of their sleeping bags and onto their feet.

In hindsight, it was as high as Sly & the Family Stone would go.

On January 10, 1970, their first single of the new decade, the double-A-sided “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Everybody Is a Star,” landed in the Top 40, and within a few weeks had become the band’s second chart topper.

Ushering in the era of bottom-heavy ’70s funk dominated by bands like Kool & the Gang, Ohio Players, and Earth, Wind & Fire, “Thank You” featured a harder sound than the Family Stone’s previous hits, with Larry Graham’s percussive thump-and-pluck bass dominating the track alongside Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini’s trumpet-and-sax combo. Sly’s lyrics weren’t exactly relegated to the background, but expectations of good-time vibes from the group that recorded “Dance to the Music” tended to obscure lines like “Flamin’ eyes of people fear burnin’ into you” and “Dyin’ young is hard to take / Sellin’ out is harder.”

The lyrics that typically stand out on first listen are the titles of previous Family Stone hits incorporated into the third verse: “Dance to the music all night long / Everyday people sing a simple song.” It comes across as playful — a clever summation of the Family Stone’s triumphs in the decade just ended.

After “Thank You” and the more conventionally arranged “Everybody Is a Star,” no new material was heard from Sly & the Family Stone for almost two years. During that time Sly did produce two singles for his little sister Vet’s vocal trio — appropriately named Little Sister — the second one a cover of “Somebody’s Watching You,” originally heard on Stand!

The Family Stone’s midtempo pop-soul version is sung with sweetness and warmth, pushing the melody into nursery-rhyme territory, a la “Everyday People.” Little Sister’s take, from 1971, is much more spare, the hushed vocals placed higher in the mix so as to foreground the paranoid lyrics:

Ever stop to think about a downfall
Happens at the end of every line
Just when you think you pulled a fast one
Happens to the foolish all the time.

The final verse is even more ominous:

The nicer the nice, the higher the price
And that’s what you pay for what you need
The higher the price, the nicer the nice
Jealous people like to see you bleed.

Little Sister’s cover of “Somebody’s Watching You” was reportedly the first instance of a drum machine being used in place of a human drummer on a mainstream record. The device’s unwavering rhythm makes the downfall mentioned in the lyrics seem like a foregone conclusion.

In November of ‘71, Sly & the Family Stone finally broke their silence of almost two years when “Family Affair,” the lead single off their fifth album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, hit the airwaves. But if “Thank You” was a bit more forceful than what fans were used to, “Family Affair” was a complete 180. The accompanying album caused confusion as well, especially from fans expecting some new rays of sunshine soul. (In contemporary terms, imagine if Radiohead had skipped OK Computer and followed up 1995’s The Bends with 2000’s Kid A.)

One of the most unsettling number-one hits of all time, “Family Affair” speaks of dysfunction — “You can’t leave, ’cause your heart is there / But you can’t stay, ’cause you been somewhere else!” — while behind the scenes there was already plenty of that to go around: singer and keyboardist Rose Stone, Sly’s sister, was the only member of the Family Stone who appeared on the track aside from Sly, singing the chorus through cupped hands. The distinctive Rhodes piano was played by Sly’s old friend Billy Preston, the guitar was provided by Bobby Womack, and the beat was programmed into a Rhythm King drum machine by Sly.

The Family Stone may have gotten the sleepy Woodstock crowd to dance to the music at 3 AM, but on “Family Affair” Sly sounds like most people feel if they happen to be awake at that time of night. It’s a mesmerizing performance — bone-tired yet brutally honest — that’s mostly confined to Sly’s lower register, but he lets loose two phlegmy falsetto screams in the final stretch that ring in your ears long after the song has ended. (His elastic voice was presumably a major influence on Prince’s style.)

Riot includes this peculiar credit: “All songs written, arranged and produced by Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone.” (Previous albums had credited Sylvester with the songs, Sly with the production.) Sylvester was the sensitive churchgoing boy who’d grown up singing in a gospel group, the Stewart Four, with his younger siblings — Rose, Freddie, and Vet (née Vaetta) — but as he told talk-show host Mike Douglas in 1974, a fifth-grade teacher misspelled the first syllable of his name on a blackboard. The nickname “Sly” stayed with him. “I think I started even acting like it after that,” he said.

Sly Stewart begat Sly Stone when he was hired to spin R&B records at San Francisco’s KSOL in October of ‘64. The 21-year-old DJ stayed at the R&B station through June of ‘67, then did a short stint at KDIA in Oakland that fall, after which the Family Stone became his top priority.

Sylvester was the student who absorbed not only the new psychedelic sounds he was hearing in the Bay Area — including the Great Society, Grace Slick’s first band — but also the sounds he was broadcasting on the radio: Bob Dylan, Motown, the Beatles, and Stax-Volt soul. (”I’d play Dylan, Hendrix, James Brown back to back, so I didn’t get stuck in any one groove,” he once said.) Sly, however, was the showman, whose outsized personality could sell the songs Sylvester was composing in his head by combining them with the visual hook of an integrated band for integrated times.

But as drugs like cocaine and PCP (and fame, as hoary as that cliche may be) entered Sly’s world in 1970, his identity, much like the sonic quality of Riot, began to muddy. The student was still there, but the showman felt the need to bring him onstage for a bow, hence Riot’s third cut, “Poet,” a precursor of hip-hop braggin’ and boastin’ (”My only weapon is my pen / And the frame of mind I’m in”). Sylvester and Sly were the Jekyll and Hyde of R&B in the ’70s, and the struggle between the two sides is documented on “Family Affair.”

“One child grows up to be somebody that just loves to learn / And another child grows up to be somebody you’d just love to burn,” sings Sly, putting extra emphasis on the last six words. (He said in an interview on KCRW in May that the song came from “a daydream,” and with songwriting in general, “I don’t necessarily have to have experienced it, but I can see it. I can feel it.”) On the subject of Sylvester and Sly’s uneasy marriage, he croaks, “Newlywed a year ago / But you’re still checking each other out / Nobody wants to blow, nobody wants to be left out.” Each side needed the other to succeed. Both sides were stuck.

Sly was in and out of drug rehab facilities in the ’80s, one of which was the Lee Mental Health Clinic in Fort Myers, Florida. In 1985 Dr. Richard Sapp told Spin magazine, “We didn’t accept ‘Sly’ in our therapy sessions. Sylvester can control Sly … Once he realized that we were serious, he became Sylvester.” Years later his father, K.C. Stewart, was quoted in Mojo magazine as saying, “You can usually tell what he’s been doing from the way he is on the phone. Mama knows the moment he says ‘Hello’ if she’s talking to Sly or Sylvester. If he tries to tell a ten-minute story in ten seconds, then it’s been a Sly Stone kinda day.”

In addition to his own internal pressure at the turn of the decade, the Oakland-based Black Panthers were applying external pressure to Sly, hoping for a militant musical endorsement, while white hippies thought they’d found their crossover superstar at Woodstock. Sly seemed to answer both suitors at once in “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” with the lyric “Thank you for the party / But I could never stay.”

Universal acceptance can be a scary thing. Sly sang about being the “Underdog” on the very first track of the Family Stone’s very first album, 1967’s A Whole New Thing, but just two years later his status had changed completely. If everyone suddenly embraces you, there can be a creeping suspicion that everyone thinks they suddenly own a piece of you, that they can control you. Sly was being polite in the lyrics of “Thank You,” but with There’s a Riot Goin’ On, he got right to the point: You know nothing about me or my music, and here’s the proof.

“Sly filled an important social void, bridging blacks and whites,” said the Family Stone’s original manager, David Kapralik, in People magazine in 1996. Sly, the radio broadcaster who wanted to reach the widest audience possible, put it more simply years earlier: “What I write is people’s music. I want everybody, even the dummies, to understand what I’m saying. That way they won’t be dummies anymore.”

He addressed the ugly reality of racism in his music only occasionally, notably in songs like 1969’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” whose title is answered by the next line in the chorus: “Don’t call me whitey, nigger.” “The sense here is one of impasse,” wrote music journalist Barney Hoskyns in an essay for the 2007 reissue of Stand! “Following the race riots of 1967 and 1968, and then … the shocking assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, the races in America began to move apart, increasingly distrustful of each other.”

In the documentary Jimi & Sly: The Skin I’m In, which aired on Showtime in 2000, Rose Stone says of her big brother, “When we were little kids and we would go from church to church and sing, if people didn’t stand and applaud and really feel the spirit of what he was singing, he’d cry afterward.” Much has been written about There’s a Riot Goin’ On being Sly’s declaration of political disillusionment, but he never addressed Vietnam in his songs, or Kent State, or MLK or RFK or LBJ. In fact, when asked by Vanity Fair writer David Kamp in 2007 whether or not Riot was a political statement, he answered, “Well, yeah, probably. But I didn’t mean it to be.”

Sly is sly, after all. And good music is good music, regardless of its “message” or whoever made it. To Sly, what mattered was the product of people’s talent and creativity, not the color of their skin.

His disillusionment may have come from witnessing free-form radio, which he’d helped popularize in the Bay Area in the mid-’60s, fading away on the FM dial. The freedom he’d enjoyed in others’ music and expressed through his own, beginning with the uplifting gospel numbers he performed as a child, was no longer being celebrated. By the end of 1970 the Beatles had broken up, and Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, and Hendrix were all dead. The colors on the musical spectrum were separating once again. On Riot Sly responded in kind by delving deeper into funk and the roots of African-American music.

As pressure mounted, he showed symptoms of a bleeding ulcer, though the ulcer itself never developed. However, “one of the clinical ways to ease the pain is cocaine,” Kapralik told Rolling Stone in 1971. Perhaps he felt that if he’d failed to take his listeners higher, the only way to numb himself from bitter disappointment was to get higher.

“Life was drugs, and it was music,” said Sly’s former personal assistant, Stephani Swanigan Owens, in Joel Selvin’s 1998 book Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History. “They would spend so many hours — thirty-six to forty-eight hours — in a stretch at the Record Plant, wearing out the engineers. But they were doing drugs, too.”

Uppers like cocaine and amphetamines gave Sly and company the stamina they needed, but on Riot the core performers weren’t the members of the Family Stone. Friends and colleagues like Preston, Womack, and Jim Ford (who wrote “Harry Hippie” for Womack) were the ones recording with Sly well into the night and the next day and the day after that.

Ike Turner, Herbie Hancock, and Miles Davis also dropped in to jam and see what this character named Sly Stone was all about. The third track on Hancock’s landmark jazz fusion album Head Hunters (1973) is titled “Sly,” and the influence of Riot’s winding groove can be heard on Davis’s divisive On the Corner (1972). The late jazz legend’s memories of Riot’s recording sessions, as chronicled in his autobiography, Miles, boiled down to “nothing but girls everywhere and coke, bodyguards with guns, looking all evil. I told him I couldn’t do nothing with him — told Columbia I couldn’t make him record any quicker. We snorted some coke together and that was it.”

Sly was eating up lots of studio time and label money at the Record Plant, as noted by Owens, and he had a Winnebago outfitted with recording equipment in case he felt like recording there as well. But mainly he was recording at his new home in southern California.

In the fall of 1970 Sly moved into a mansion in Bel Air owned by John and Michelle Phillips — the head of the Family Stone was now in the home of the Mamas and the Papas. (The Phillipses had their own share of dysfunction: John’s oldest daughter, actress Mackenzie Phillips, revealed in her 2009 memoir, High on Arrival, that she used cocaine with her father and had a ten-year incestuous relationship with him, starting when she was 19.)

Sly first learned about the house from his friend Terry Melcher, a record producer and A&R man at Columbia Records (the sister label of Epic, which put out Sly’s albums). At the time Melcher wasn’t showing his face much in public: After declining to sign a musician named Charles Manson to a recording contract, Manson came looking for him at the house he was renting in Los Angeles. Melcher and his girlriend, Candice Bergen, had already moved out, though; another successful young couple, film director Roman Polanski and actress Sharon Tate, were now living in the house. Tate was eight and a half months pregnant when Manson and his “family” murdered her and three of her friends on August 9, 1969.

“When we first moved into that house, there were rooms that had some things in them that made us think the house was haunted,” said Owens. “We found a Ouija board in there. We found different pieces of paperwork that made us believe they were into witchcraft.” Sly increased the general level of discomfort by bringing his dog, a violent pit bull terrier named Gun. According to Joel Selvin’s article about Riot in the August 2001 issue of Mojo magazine, Sly also owned a baboon, “but Gun killed the baboon and then fucked it.”

John Phillips had installed a recording studio in the attic, which held great appeal for his new renter. Sly could now record whenever he wanted. And he could keep people waiting as long as he wanted while he waited to be “inspired.” In 1970 he missed 26 out of 80 scheduled concerts, in some cases leaving the rest of the Family Stone in limbo backstage while he got high. Fans grew frustrated, occasionally rioting in the wake of cancellations.

As Errico told Selvin, “On one hand, [Sly] had the capabilities of handling all that attention, fame, big audiences. But on the other hand, there was another part of him that didn’t want it, couldn’t handle it, and wanted to be away from it. This fight always went on, where he wanted to be the biggest, the baddest, best, and then, when he got it, he didn’t want to be it; he was scared of it.”

Sly himself described for KCRW a performance of the Stewart Four’s at the Oakland Civic Auditorium: “Towards the end of the song, people started running down the aisle … I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know that they were just happy, [that] they weren’t just gonna come up and grab me. So I turned around and started running … and I’ve been running ever since.” The next-to-last cut on Riot is “Runnin’ Away,” in which Sly sings, “Running away to get away / Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! / You’re wearing out your shoes / Look at you fooling you!” And just as he sang “Thank you for the party / But I could never stay” a year before Riot’s release, he’d continue giving hints about his early retirement on future albums, particularly 1973’s Fresh and the single “If You Want Me to Stay” (”Count the days I’m gone … / Because I promise / I’ll be gone for a while”).

As his band became more and more popular, Sly withdrew further into the Sly Stone persona he’d created, though the showman was aggressively transforming into a wannabe pimp, with lots of money, women, drugs, and guns at his disposal. The nicer the nice, the higher the price.

There’s a Riot Goin’ On was the first Family Stone album not to feature the band on the cover, but it’s also the only one that doesn’t feature Sly, either. The flag that’s pictured is red, white, and black, representing “people of all colors,” blood red being the color we all share on the inside. But the symbolism of Sly’s American flag is as inclusive as the album ever gets. Without question it’s his most introspective effort, with the focus in his songwriting shifting from “we” to “me,” and after Riot he was the only band member to get any face time on the cover, which was somewhat appropriate since the band had stopped recording together in the studio by the time of the Riot sessions. The cover of 1976’s Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back (the title was wishful thinking), a Family Stone album in name only, pictured Sly as a one-man band, but he’d already been operating with that attitude in the studio for years.

For Riot, Sly began overdubbing band members’ contributions onto existing tracks, sometimes replacing them with his own instrumentation if he thought he could do a better job matching the sound he heard in his mind. All the late-night overdubbing and erasing on the master tape is what gives Riot its murky fidelity, a stark contrast to the bright, shiny sound of previous Family Stone albums.

But whether or not the eventual aural atmosphere of the album was completely intentional, there’s no denying that the lo-fi audio adds to the listener’s feeling of being in a drug haze, coming down from the 1969 highs of Stand! and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and being submerged in the dark waters of “Family Affair,” the bluesy, menacing “Just Like a Baby,” and the hypnotically overpowering “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa.” The bass is so prominent throughout the album, and the drum-machine beats so relentless, that the keyboards on “Africa Talks to You ‘The Asphalt Jungle’” and the guitar on “Thank You” feel like needles pricking the skin whenever they make an appearance. We may all share the same blood, but on Riot there’s ice in Sly’s veins.

The album kicks off, in fact, with the sound of a throbbing bass guitar, and as music journalist Touré says in the liner notes for Sony’s reissue of the Family Stone’s 1973 album Fresh, “If you hear a nasty bass line, you know funk is coming.” The funk never lets up on Riot, but it’s not dance funk or party funk or even P-Funk. It’s lonely, claustrophobic, 3 AM funk. The album’s opener, “Luv n’ Haight,” like “Family Affair,” is an expression of the internal and external pressure being exerted on Sly. The chorus switches from Sly singing “Feel so good / Don’t want to move / Feel so good inside myself / Don’t need to move” to Little Sister chanting “Feel so good / Feel so good / I want to move / I want to move” over and over again in the last half of the song, with their vocals switching from the left channel to the right on each line, boxing in Sly (and any listener using headphones), who’s seemingly paralyzed by drugs, his two “sides,” or other forces.

Depending on how you feel about There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the midtempo inertia that takes hold over the rest of the album is either monotonous and enervating or a case of Sly brilliantly pushing the boundaries of popular music as if it were a rubber band that could snap at any second. Stephen Paley, a former Epic A&R executive and friend of Sly’s, said Riot “was almost like brinksmanship. He wanted to see how far from commercial he could go and still be commercial.”

“Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa,” a dramatic reworking of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” is cut from the same cloth as Little Sister’s cover of “Somebody’s Watching You.” On the new version Sly replaces Larry Graham’s signature slap bass with a thudding “bottom” of his own and slows the tempo to a crawl. Though the echoed vocals sound like they’re coming from a part of your brain you’d rather not know about, the lyrics are no longer hiding behind a bouncy dance groove:

Lookin’ at the devil, grinnin’ at his gun
Fingers start shakin’, I begin to run
Bullets start chasin’, I begin to stop
We begin to wrestle, I was on the top

Is Sly the devil, and African rhythms the source of Sylvester’s strength if he hopes to eventually conquer his other self? There’s a Riot Goin’ On features some gospel-derived “call and response,” but not in the way one might expect. The title of the album is a response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released six months earlier in 1971, and side one’s “Africa Talks to You” receives a grateful “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” on side two. But whereas the name-checking of previous Family Stone hits on the original “Thank You” seemed like clever wordplay, in this context it’s a rejection of all that came before, as if Sly’s mocking anyone who was dumb enough to believe his previous messages of hope, truth, and togetherness:

Dance to the music all night long
Everyday people, sing a simple song
Mama’s so happy, mama starts to cry
Papa’s still singin’, you can make it if you try

If Sly’s intention on Riot was to tear down his music and everything it once represented in order to build it back up again as a new, different beast, then he accomplished what he set out to do. Riot is a hard album to love — its bookends, Stand! and Fresh, are much more accessible — but it’s impossible to forget.

Greil Marcus, who reviewed Riot three times for Creem magazine, wrote in his 1974 book Mystery Train, “With this album, Sly is giving his audience — particularly his white audience — precisely what they don’t want. What they want from Sly is an upper, not a portrait of what lies behind his big freaky black superstar grin. One gets the feeling, listening to this album, that Sly’s disastrous concerts of the past year have not been so much a matter of insulting his audience as attacking it, with real bitterness and hate, because of what its demands on him have forced him to produce. It is an attack on himself as well, for having gone along with those demands.”

Indeed, after the commercial failure of the Family Stone’s debut album, the rhythmically expansive A Whole New Thing (1967), Sly was told he needed to simplify his sound in order to get his songs played on the radio (by DJs who were possibly less open-minded than he was during his broadcasting days). His response was “Dance to the Music,” which became one of the band’s signature songs. He even repeated its chord progression on several songs from the accompanying album of the same name.

“He hated it. He just did it to sell records,” Martini told Selvin. “The whole album was called Dance to the Music, dance to the medley, dance to the shmedley. It was so unhip to us. The beats were glorified Motown beats. We had been doing something different, but these beats weren’t going over. So we did the formula thing. The rest is history and he continued his formula style.” But as Miles Marshall Lewis wrote in his book about Riot for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, “By the introspective, mournful There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Sly didn’t give a fuck about people pleasing, which is also largely the album’s tale in a nutshell.”

Ironically, “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” is the only real band performance by the Family Stone that appears on Riot. (Errico said it’s the one track on the album where he can hear his drumming.) It was supposedly recorded in ‘69 around the same time as the original “Thank You,” after Sly moved from San Francisco to L.A. That’s when the band began to splinter.

Robinson and Martini moved into the Phillips mansion in the fall of 1970, but the rest of the band kept their homes in the Bay Area. They’d travel to Bel Air to record their parts when requested, but as Sly became more isolated and arrogant, he’d keep them waiting around in the house until he was ready to see them. Errico quit sometime during the Riot sessions, fed up with the drugs and the canceled concerts and the endless waiting, leading Sly, the musical innovator, to employ the Rhythm King drum machine on tracks like “Family Affair,” “Poet,” and “Time.”

Time — which “needs another minute (at least),” according to the song — was another source of pressure for Sly. Epic Records, realizing a new album wasn’t coming anytime soon, released Greatest Hits in time for the Christmas shopping season in 1970, adding “Thank You,” “Everybody Is a Star,” and the band’s other post-Stand! single, “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” to the track listing. (They had hoped those songs would be part of a new album ready for release in early 1970. Sly had other plans.) The quickie compilation was a smash success, putting further pressure on Sly to come up with a new album that could rival or even top it.

In the meantime, everyone would have to wait. He didn’t allow clocks in the Phillips mansion, and when Sly — clearly stoned — ignored Dick Cavett’s attempts to sign off at the end of his own show on June 8, 1971, by imploring him to “Wait a minute, man,” the talk-show host finally had to say “Time marches on!” over the exit music. Sly had already shown up late for the live broadcast, forcing Cavett to kill time on air. (The band wasn’t asked back.)

“Take your time / But you’ve got a limit,” Sly sings, the second line possibly a veiled apology to everyone who was fed up with him. The man hadn’t lost his sense of humor — his yodeling on “Spaced Cowboy” offers some comic relief even if the growls he interjects remind you of the somewhat frightening company you’ve chosen to keep — but his jokes were bleaker this time around. Side one of Riot closes with the title track, whose running time on the LP is listed as “0:00.” Time, it appears, has run out. Or did the stopwatch never start? “I did it because I felt there should be no riots,” Sly once said of the nonexistent track. Or maybe the riot in question was always meant as a laugh riot and nothing more, with Sly’s growing audience the butt of the joke — Riot was the band’s only album to reach #1, after all.

However, it’s hard not to wonder if Sly was inspired by the Last Poets, the hip-hop forebears whose spoken-word number “Run, Nigger” was featured on their 1970 self-titled album:

Time is running out on our natural habits
Time is running out on lifeless serpents reigning over a living kingdom
Time is running out of talks, marches, tunes, chants, and all kinds of prayers
Time is running out of time

Sly also indicates that time has run out (on the ideals of the ’60s? on the Family Stone? on music?) when he sings “Timber … all fall down!” in “Africa Talks to You,” a fairly explicit rejection of Stand! Those who still believe in the Summer of Love get a reprimand as well: “Watch out, ’cause the summer gets cold / When today gets too old!” Only the “Brave & Strong” survive.

In Jeff Kaliss’s 2008 book I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone, Sly himself says that record executives weren’t just pressuring him to manage his time properly: “People were coming from all different kinds of record companies. People were talking to different people in the group, and telling me that I didn’t need this person or that person, or telling [the group's members] how they didn’t need this or that person. They break you up so they can have different concerts every night, and make everybody different stars, with different record sales.” Even so, it’s hard to deny that the main force behind the gradual breakup of Sly & the Family Stone was none other than Sly himself.

On January 9, 1980, a full decade after “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” entered the Top 40, Sly was a guest once again on The Mike Douglas Show. A clip of his appearance, which pops up near the end of The Skin I’m In, shows actress Valerie Harper, Douglas’s cohost for the week, staring slack-jawed at an almost incomprehensible, drugged-out Sly, who sounds like he’s imitating a vocoder as he says, “I’m gonna do one more album real quick, and if it’s not instantly platinum …” He pauses, shakes his head, then sings the words “Bye, y’all, bye, y’all.”

True to his word, Sly recorded only one more album, 1983’s underwhelming Ain’t But the One Way, which was completed by producer Stewart Levine without Sly’s input — he’d gone AWOL after the initial sessions in ‘81 and couldn’t be found (or maybe Warner Bros., his label at the time, decided it would cost less to finish the album without his increasingly unreliable talents). He surfaced in time to promote One Way on Late Night With David Letterman, but even the album’s cover had to be created without him: the camouflage hat he’s wearing appears to be the same one from his 1980 Mike Douglas Show appearance.

The most striking song on One Way is “Ha Ha, Hee Hee,” which includes one of the most directly reflective verses in Sly’s discography:

Ha ha, hee hee
Nothing to do
You beat the genius in you
But who cares if you are through
Or do
You’ll never miss it

Too bad the person doing the reflecting isn’t Sly — “Ha Ha, Hee Hee” was written by longtime musical associate Pat Rizzo. Sly had already checked out.

“Time is here to stay,” he sang in 1971, on “Runnin’ Away.” But he obviously couldn’t make that promise himself.

Just Like a Baby
Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa

President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a decision that instantly created controversy. For one thing, Tina Fey wasn’t even nominated. For another, Obama’s been president less than nine months, and had only been in office for 12 days when his nomination was submitted.

In case you’re wondering who nominated him, NobelPrize.org states, “The names of the nominees and other information about the nominations cannot be revealed until 50 years later.” So if you’re an anti-birther or anti-taxer or anti-tolerater, the answer is: the Forces of Evil. (And if you’re wondering how I know about Tina Fey, sorry, but I’m not sharing my peyote with you.)

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which chooses the winner each year, explained that “Obama has as a president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.” According to the Associated Press, committee member and Norwegian politician Aagot Valle added that this year’s prize should be seen as “support and a commitment for Obama.”

The president, for his part, was humble about his victory. “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize,” he said. “I will accept this award as a call to action.”

But just a few hours before Obama’s victory was announced, he stood idly by as NASA tried to blow up the moon! From what I can gather, the U.S. space agency’s $79 million rocket was supposed to poke a giant hole in the Alan Shepard Memorial Golf Course, at which point all the water inside the moon would rain down on Earth — because the moon is up above and we’re down below and that’s how gravity works — thereby solving our planet’s impending water crisis.

Unfortunately, the expected Michael Bay-style cloud of ice and dust never materialized, leaving terrestrial blow-’em-up enthusiasts with only a small white flash on the moon’s surface to ogle through their telescopes. Kaboom-o-philes immediately voiced their dissatisfaction on Twitter — where intelligent discourse occasionally rises above the level of which soup users are eating to ward off swine flu — while the Man in the Moon posted his own message seconds later: “something just hit me n the ass & it stings like hell. omg, i am so not n the mood, ya’ll! WTF???”

Though the president hasn’t officially declared war on the moon yet, the U.S. is still trying to finish off the previous administration’s leftovers in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention discouraging Johnny Depp and Disney from filming the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie anywhere near Somalia.

Giving Obama the Peace Prize for the peace he might help bring about in the next three years sounds suspiciously like when parents give a teenager a new car as a bribe for good grades. “Barry, do you promise to achieve peace in the Middle East if we give you this prize?” In lieu of results, the Nobel committee accepts IOUs. (In case anyone from the Pulitzer committee is reading this, I promise my writing will improve if you give me a prize.)

I don’t mean to rain on the president’s parade, but I have a feeling that the Nobel outsiders are still trying to get the attention of that sexy bad boy George W. Bush. Sure, he’s a bully and not that smart, but boy howdy, what a smirk!

Two years ago they gave the Peace Prize to Al Gore, Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2000 presidential election, and now Obama gets it. I mean, it ain’t like that mention of “the role that the United Nations … can play” was subtle by any means. Just let it go, Norway. I’m sure other democracy-hating democracy promoters (President Bush was nothing if not cleverly ironic) will come along eventually.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the entire Scandinavian subcontinent just felt bad for Obama because he couldn’t help his adopted hometown of Chicago win bragging rights to the 2016 Summer Olympics on October 2. I guess he didn’t trash his hotel room in Copenhagen last week or yell at any pastry chefs for getting his Danish order wrong, ensuring that Scandinavia would give him another prize a week later just so he’d make a return visit. Obama doesn’t court celebrity, but if those Scandinavians need a charismatic famous person to brighten their sunshine-free days, I don’t see any reason why we should stand in their way.

And speaking of celebrities, Obama needs to be careful that he doesn’t turn into the Jennifer Hudson or Affleck-and-Damon of Nobel Peace Prize recipients. Hudson won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first film, 2006’s Dreamgirls, but her backstory — an American Idol reject who was expected to become a footnote to pop-culture history — was much more interesting than her performance.

Similarly, Good Will Hunting (1997) is an entertaining, feel-good drama, but Ben Affleck and Matt Damon most likely won the Best Original Screenplay award because of their off-screen trajectory: best friends since childhood (and tenth cousins, once removed, according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society), they wrote a movie for themselves to star in that quickly turned the duo into A-list leading men. Hooray for Hollywood! (Affleck’s first film after winning the Oscar in ‘98 was Michael Bay’s Armageddon, in which NASA sends oil riggers, i.e. real men like George W. Bush, into space to blow up an asteroid.)

And hooray for our president, but most importantly, hooray for the United States, because for the majority of this decade our international reputation hasn’t been so hot. Jennifer Hudson’s life as an actor may take a backseat to her singing career, and Affleck and Damon will probably never write another screenplay together, so all President Obama has to do is make good on at least some of his promises for peace and he’ll be ahead of the game — at least the kind of game played by real celebrities, who have nothing to do with the fate of the nation, no matter what E! News tells us.

Before I go, I do have one complaint: The Nobel committee said that it “attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” Good for him, but 22 years ago Superman gave his all to rid the world of nuclear weapons, only to be completely shut out during awards season!

Instead the 1987 Peace Prize was given to Oscar Arias Sánchez, who as president of Costa Rica signed peace accords to promote democracy in Central America. That’s great and all, but Superman gathered all the world’s nuclear weapons into a big net and threw them into the sun. Why wasn’t that noteworthy enough for a Nobel prize?

Of course, the resulting shock waves from the explosion of thousands of nuclear weapons in the heart of the sun should’ve been large enough and violent enough to incinerate everything and everyone on Earth and beyond. Luckily for us, Superman was stuck with low-budget special effects in 1987, much like NASA in 2009.

In fact, most Americans are having to make do with low budgets these days. The international community may be expecting President Obama to address the problems of peace around the world, but first he’ll be expected to address the peace of mind of frustrated constituents here at home.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi TV reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last December, was released from prison on September 15 after serving nine months of a one-year sentence. (Throwing a shoe at a person is considered highly disrespectful in Islamic culture.) Immediately hailed as a hero in the Arab, Muslim, and NPR-listening worlds last winter for his act of defiance — he yelled “This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” and “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!” as he hurled each shoe at Bush — al-Zeidi emerged from prison into a world with a new American president and a decreased U.S. military presence in his home country. Now, in a loosely translated Popdose exclusive, he speaks out about his experience.

When I went into prison last year, I was 29 years old. Now I am 30 years old. I am a man now, and in prison I was the man, as you Americans say. People made T-shirts. A game on the Internet called Sock and Awe was created by people with much time on their hands. (It is fun. Play it. You could waste your life in worse ways.) And the video of me throwing my shoes at President George Bush “went viral,” I was told. My prison guards even threw me a birthday party in January. They gave me bright green shoes with holes on the top side that are called Crocs. It was amusing at first.

Many things can change in a short amount of time, however. The zeitgeist — it has shifted. The world has moved on. My people say to me, “The sectarian violence is not like it was, Muntadhar, and this new American president, unlike the previous one, he has a brain.”

Now there is a very bad crime wave, however, and it is led by the same people who almost pushed Iraq into a civil war. They cannot find jobs, so they kidnap and demand ransoms instead. Learn new skills, gentlemen. Take computer classes. Oh, that is right, I have forgotten — there is no electricity to run the computers! Carry on then, sectarian thugs.

Let me make a thing clear right here and now — I do not regret throwing my shoes at Little Bush. If I am given another opportunity to throw shoes at him, I shall bring clown shoes so big they cannot possibly miss his thick head! If I were to be granted access to Imelda Marcos’s bottomless pit of footwear, I would throw all 3,000 pairs at the man who tried to take over my country just so his presidential limousine never runs out of gas! Spiked heels facing forward, but of course.

I would like to address a particular thing, if I may. People said I was a hero around the whole wide world for what I did that day in 2008, but I do not think I am a hero, and I was not looking for attention, I promise you of that.

Some of my fellow journalist reporters think I was trying to make myself the story. That is not true. They say, “He is a TV reporter. He likes to shock people. Sensationalism is his game, and that is also its name. It keeps people watching. Now watch me as I roll my eyes at him.” Hey there, fellow journalists, let me ask you this, however — if you wanted to be neutral and without bias, why did you pull me to the ground after I threw the shoes? When you did that, you became part of the story. Think about that and take two and then you call me in the morning, okay? Yes, thank you.

My anger was allowed by me to get the better part of me. I do not disagree with those who think that opinion. I do disagree with those who think I was trying to make “Muntadhar al-Zeidi” a name in households around the world. If “Muntadhar al-Zeidi” is now a name that trips off the tongue the way I hope that Little Bush and Dark Lord Cheney trip off a cliff on K2 in Pakistan, I do not mind. If Bush and Cheney fall on Osama bin Laden, that will be good too. Two birds or more with one stone, as you Americans say it.

Of course, however, if you kill bin Laden, the poster boy for Little Bush’s “war on terror” is gone. Little Bush is gone now, yes, but the Dark Lord Cheney will never go away. After he dies, his ghost spirit will possess a new politician or overmedicated chat-show host. Evil never dies — it just changes its name to patriotism and starts over again. President Obama, watch out for yourself. The Cheney specter haunts your house! (Do not be afraid of the Arlen Specter, however, unless he switches parties again.)

In prison we watched W., the movie about Little Bush. Movie director Oliver Stone, was I meant to laugh or cry? Take the S off your surname and you have my main problem with your movie. You are like American military forces in the Middle East — all over the map!

I kid, I kid. But seriously, W. has major tonal inconsistencies. (Four stars, film critic Roger Ebert? I shall lightly brush you with baby shoes if we ever meet.)

However, I was unprepared for Little Bush’s relationship with Big Bush. Little Bush never felt the feeling of encouragement or acceptance from his father, the president who first raped my homeland in 1991, even after Little Bush became the governor of Texas, which is not a worthless little state like New Jersey, yes?

I too know the feeling of not feeling these things. My father hated Big Bush, who never liberated us from Saddam (another evil “patriot”) like he promised. My father hoped to one day throw a pair of metal cleats at Big Bush. However, that opportunity never knocked.

When I threw my shoes at Little Bush, I did it for my people, but I cannot lie — I also did it to impress my father. When he wrote to me in prison on my 30th birthday, do you know what he said? “You missed.” When Little Bush and Big Bush talk about both being president, do you think Big Bush reminds Little Bush that he did not really win his 2000 election?

No matter where you live, you cannot please some people any of the time. I will never apologize for throwing my shoes at you, Little Bush, but maybe now perhaps, with time and reflection on my side, I can understand you a little better.

After I left prison, I read about the American politician whose name is Joe Wilson. He is lucky he is not a reporter in Iraq, do you not agree? Of course, however, if he had thrown shoes at President Obama after yelling at him, it might be a different story in your country. Freedom of speech, freedom of throwing arm — “toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe,” yes?

You have much freedom in America. Good for you, Americans. However, do not pretend everyone else in the world wants the same freedom in the same way. Do you remember the old advertisements for Nike shoes? The slogan was “Just do it.” When it comes to spreading your democracy seeds in the Middle East, ignore this advice, please. Shoes can send a strong message, but shoe slogans should never dictate foreign policy.

When things are said off the record in the world of politics, they should stay off the record. Unless I need something to write about, of course.

Last week I brought you an exclusive report on the scripted outbursts Rep. Joe Wilson almost said in place of “You lie!” when responding to President Obama’s position on illegal immigrants receiving universal health care. I obtained the list of outbursts from a congressional aide named Mark Cloth, who asked not to be identified, but I’m not a real journalist with “ethics” or “common decency” — either slip me a Benjamin or suffer the consequences.

I went ahead and used Cloth’s name, but it turns out he was using an alias inspired by Deep Throat, from All the President’s Men. He duped me, but I’m not mad. The way I see it, we both got what we wanted, and neither of us had to look at the other one naked.

On Monday the president was about to be interviewed by John Harwood when the CNBC reporter casually asked him what he thought of Kanye West’s outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night, comparing the hip-hop artist to Wilson. West had interrupted Best Female Video winner Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech by grabbing the microphone from her and complaining that Beyoncé deserved the award instead. Obama’s opinion was “He’s a jackass,” which got some laughs from people in the room, but the president quickly tried to make sure his off-the-cuff comment would stay off the record.

Yeah, right. The tape was already rolling, and Terry Moran, co-anchor of ABC’s Nightline, apparently overheard the pre-interview conversation, because he soon jumped on his Twitter account and wrote, “Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.” And that’s unprofessional, Moron — unless you somehow got a Benjamin out of it, that is. (I wonder if he had to look at Vice President Biden naked.)

Thanks to my good friends at TMZ, who must’ve skipped journalism class the day ethics were discussed, the audio is available to anyone with an Internet connection. According to FoxNews.com, only a president who “lashes out” would make such a “stunning remark,” but if you listen to the pre-interview conversation, the president is simply reacting honestly yet lightheartedly to West’s latest attempt to grab the spotlight. Then again, if you get your news from Fox News, you may have an honest reaction of your own to what I just said: “You lie!”

Fair enough. But as my friend Beau Johnson pointed out to me this morning, “There have to be a billion Republicans who think the same thing [about what West did to red-state sweetheart Swift]. And now Obama and Rush Limbaugh have something in common!” Beau lives in South Carolina and is proud that Joe Wilson has his state’s best interests at heart, not to mention Governor Mark Sanford, whose efforts this past summer to build a bridge between Argentina and his pants were highly commendable. And now that Kanye has built a bridge between Democrats and Republicans, who can’t agree on anything else lately, this country has a real shot at progress.

That’s why we as a nation shouldn’t come down too hard on Mr. West. After all, he did apologize to Taylor Swift two days after upstaging her victory at the VMAs — first he had to talk it out with his therapist, Jay Leno — just as Wilson quickly apologized to the president for calling him a liar on September 9. And much like the illegal immigrants Wilson wants to prevent from hogging all the complimentary lollipops at the doctor’s office, West takes the thankless jobs the rest of America doesn’t want.

C’mon, don’t you wish Kanye could pop into your life every now and then to speak up on your behalf? For instance, let’s say you’ve been called into your boss’s office at work. He has some bad news — you’re being laid off. Have no fear, Kanye’s here: “Yo, mister boss man, I really like your office’s tasteful artwork, and I’m-a let you finish your severance-package talk, but [your name here] is one of the best employees of all time. One of the best employees of all time!”

Here’s another example. Your boyfriend takes you to a crowded restaurant, and right after the main course arrives, you suddenly realize he’s about to break up with you. Soon-to-be-single ladies, you could use some help from Kanye: “Yo, dude, I really like that you’re willing to shell out for Olive Garden on a Friday night, and I’m-a let you finish your fancy meal, but [your name here] is one of the best significant others of all time!” (Aimiee, if you’re reading this right now, stop. You know how you get.)

Today is the two-month anniversary of black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. being arrested by white police officer James Crowley in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Do you remember where you were on 7/16? Do you think you’ll ever be able to forget the events of that day? If your answer is no, drink a beer. Then drink another. Then drink a third one for Joe Biden, since he drank a nonalcoholic Buckler at the July 30 “beer summit” at the White House, probably so he wouldn’t end up naked in front of Terry Moran.

Gates’s arrest never should’ve happened, nor should the president’s July 22 comment that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting him. Why, you ask? Because I slapped the handcuffs on racism and put it away for life back in June. Didn’t America learn anything from me?! What’s with you people?

Yes, the 2008 presidential election made us a postracial society, but my June 30 column made us a postpostracial society, which should’ve turned things kind of self-referential and meta, which in turn should’ve led to Kanye West interrupting Lucia Whalen’s phone call to the Cambridge Police Department on July 16: “Yo, 40-year-old white lady, I’m really happy that you’re doing something nice for an old white lady who thinks a middle-aged black man who walks with a cane is breaking into a house through the front door in broad daylight — and I’m-a let you finish your call — but Henry Louis Gates is one of the most respected scholars of all time! And Sergeant Jim Crowley, who I’m predicting will be on the scene in a few minutes, is one of the most colorblind cops of all time, though I mean that in a metaphorical sense because he’s taught classes on racial profiling, not a literal one!”

See, Kanye could’ve identified the real enemy in the Gates-Crowley incident: old people. The events of 7/16 never would’ve happened if that little old lady who remains anonymous to this day (Who wants to bet it was Mark Cloth’s grandma?) hadn’t stopped Whalen on the street. She claimed she didn’t have her own cell phone. A likely story!

The bottom line is that old people are living longer and longer — life expectancy in the U.S. as of 2005 was an average of 77.8 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, up from 75.8 in 1995 — which means they’re going to be setting up more and more of us to make “emergency” phone calls, which will lead to more and more of us having to explain to the media and the nation that no, we don’t believe in racial profiling, but yes, we do believe it’s a serious issue. (Don’t look now, but you’re getting older every second!) Besides, the need for weekly beer summits — Wilson and Obama, Kanye and Taylor, Obama and Kanye, Wilson and Mexico — is already becoming a problem.

However, the July 30 beer summit did make me wonder if a fun drinking game can be created to ease some tension: every time you’re in your car and you pass by a driver who’s been stopped for a DWB, or Driving While Black, take a drink! (Okay, so it’s a work in progress. Lemme get back to you on that one.)

Speaking of cell phones, you may remember that on July 17, one day after 7/16, I published a guest column by Murray, my lawyer/friend Dave-o’s dog, about how he wishes Dave-o would spend less time on the phone and more time with Murray. I thought it might be a good, gentle wake-up call for Dave-o, but I didn’t let him see the column before it was published. He went nuts.

He felt that Murray’s thoughts — or he thought that Murray’s feelings (whatever) — should’ve stayed off the record, and that I should’ve let him “vet” (hell yeah, pun intended!) the story first. It seems Dave-o’s been receiving some pretty nasty e-mails and phone calls from SICEM, the Society of International Canine Enthusiasts and Mercenaries, and they’re not too happy about the so-called “psychological torture” he’s been inflicting on Murray by ignoring him on their walks.

Dave-o was threatening to sue me, so my girlfriend, the aforementioned Aimiee, convened a beer summit — Murray was the designated driver, so he only had a Buckler, for PETA’s sake — and I agreed to not publish another Sugar Water about my personal life until September. So, to all of you who’ve been writing me e-mails and accusing me of procrastinating the past two months, all I have to say is that you didn’t know the whole story. Or, as Joe Wilson might say: “You lie!”

In August 1’s New York Times, Bob Herbert wrote an op-ed piece about Gates’s arrest. “The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong,” he wrote. “You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.”

You can also yell at the president of the United States, as Rep. Joe Wilson did, but just like in any other situation, whether you’re on the record or off, it’s important to watch what you say — or publish, as I learned with Dave-o and Murray.

As for Kanye West, judging by the crop-circle-type markings he’s shaved into his head, I can only assume that his many public outbursts are some sort of signal to an interstellar race, one he hopes will beam him up and take him to a place where he’ll no longer be misunderstood or accused of putting on an act.

Wait a second — Kanye … Kenya … Obama … the latest Dan Brown novel …

Ah, never mind. The latest anti-birther conspiracy theory can wait until next time.

I said last Friday I’d keep these columns short and simple from now on, didn’t I? Yeah, well … I lied.

Beau Johnson, “Walking” (from 2009’s Chill Out: Atlantic Edition, Vol. 2)
Common featuring Kanye West, “Southside” (from 2007’s Finding Forever)
Pretenders, “Thin Line Between Love and Hate” (from 1987’s The Singles)
Bunny Sigler, “I Lied” (from 1996’s The Best of Bunny Sigler: Sweeter Than the Berry)

Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina became a household name on Wednesday when he “heckled” President Obama during the commander-in-chief’s speech on health-care reform before a joint session of Congress. After Obama assured lawmakers that any systemwide overhaul wouldn’t extend health benefits to illegal immigrants, Wilson rebel-yelled, “You lie!”

According to congressional aide Mark Cloth, who wished to remain anonymous but didn’t bribe me enough to warrant serious consideration, Wilson was seen drinking 12-ounce cups of espresso for several hours before the president’s speech. The fourth-term conservative Republican lawmaker was also “high on pro-life and a two-day marathon of Lou Dobbs Tonight on his DVR.”

The cheapskate aide also revealed that Wilson’s supposedly spontaneous outburst was carefully scripted in order to convey the most effective opposition to Obama’s health-care initiatives, with dozens of drafts written over the past several weeks. In the end, however, simple noun-verb agreement combined with pro-wrestling body language proved to be the most direct route to getting Wilson’s point across.

And what’s so bad about simplicity? We live in a time of “tweets,” after all. Call Rep. Joe Wilson what you will, but he’s taught me a valuable lesson about keeping Sugar Water short and simple from now on, because otherwise all those words in my brain just pile up alongside all those newspaper clippings gathering dust on my desk, and suddenly it’s been almost two months since I wrote an actual column.

Granted, I spent all of August traveling around the country to President Obama’s town-hall meetings so I could stand beside angry Americans and shout “Rubber baby buggy bumpers!” over and over again — none of them heard me since they were all busy yelling nonsensical words and phrases themselves — but now I’m back. America, I need this forum. And you need me. Even if you have no interest in bribing me.

Thanks to Cloth, the Capitol Hill lackey with the suspiciously shallow pockets, I now have a sample of the scripted outbursts Rep. Wilson considered using on Wednesday but ultimately rejected in favor of “You lie!” Here they are, in no particular order …

1. “You bad man! You go away now!”

2. “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. Because as far as I know, there’s no existing health-care plan that covers HULKING OUT!!!!!”

3. “Hi, Joe Wilson here. As a representative of the great state of South Carolina, where hospitality and gentility are as common as the morning dew, I graciously invite you to suck it.”

4. “¿Cómo? ¿¡Cómo?! No hablo ingles, Señor Presidente — me speaky the language of irony!”

5. “Let the record show that my voice was dripping with sarcasm when I made the following statement: ‘You are so funny. I cannot stop laughing. Seriously, stop. You are killing me, and I do not want to die before I get the chance to sample your miraculous health-care plan.’”

6. “Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Mr. Toby Keith, performing his latest single, ‘Every Melting Pot Needs a Good Scrubbing’!”

7. Scream. Accuse. Interrupt. Bully. In general, imitate the actions of daytime talk-show guests and audience members. (These general “stage directions” were borrowed from ultra-right-wing attendees of recent town-hall meetings in the Palmetto State.)

8. “Can’t we focus on some real issues here, like the fact that Michael Jackson’s death was ruled a homicide — a homicide caused by health care!”

9. “Show us your tits!” (Surprisingly, this was the front runner going into Wednesday.)

10. “I can’t believe I’m missing a George Lopez marathon for this.”

Mark Cloth … Cloth … why does that name sound familiar?

Oh. Right. Mark Felt.

Well played, Deep Throat/Shallow Pockets. Well played.

The summer movie season finally begins to wind down this weekend with the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. So what’s next in Hollywood’s blockbuster pipeline? Would you believe a song-and-dance remake of The Bodyguard starring Hugh Jackman and Miley Cyrus? As of July that was the case, but earlier this month a spokesperson for the Wolverine star denied he was involved in the project.

It’s just as well since “Personal Security” sounded like an April Fool’s Day joke in the first place, but these days it can be difficult to tell when Hollywood’s being serious about its various remakes (The Last Dragon, The Secret of NIMH, and even 1985’s Clue, among many others, are currently in development), sequels (a second Bull Durham, a fourth Beverly Hills Cop, a fifth Indiana Jones adventure), and adaptations of everything under the sun. (By the way, I loved that comment you left on the site that one time. In fact, that comment would make a great movie!)

Can you believe everything you read? Well, of course you can, but that doesn’t mean you should. Without consulting any sources, including all your friends who work at Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, take the quiz below and submit your answers to me via e-mail. A winner will be chosen at random and will receive a prize package that includes Hannah Montana: The Movie on Blu-ray, the first season of Peyton Place on DVD, and a free copy of Jack Wagner’s Don’t Give Up Your Day Job, recently reissued on CD by Friday Music. Hey, remember when the General Hospital star made the jump to the big screen in 1984’s Hard to Hold? Or maybe that was somebody else. Oh well, on with the quiz!

1. Following the success of the two Transformers movies and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which toy line from the 1980s is next in line for the silver-screen treatment?

(a) Gobots
(b) M.A.S.K.
(c) Jem
(d) Masters of the Universe

2. True or false? The Lego Group recently signed a deal with a major studio to make movies based on its building-block toys.

(a) True
(b) False

3. Which popular board game is not being adapted into a movie?

(a) Candy Land
(b) Life
(c) Monopoly
(d) Battleship

4. Oliver Stone is attached to direct “Monopoly.”

(a) True
(b) False

5. Which of the following Atari video games is being developed for the big screen?

(a) Asteroids
(b) Pitfall
(c) Combat
(d) Breakout

6. General Mills is partnering with two studios to turn its Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry cereals into 3-D animated films.

(a) True
(b) False

7. Which popular 1980s TV series is not being adapted into a movie?

(a) MacGyver
(b) Magnum, P.I.
(c) Scarecrow and Mrs. King
(d) T.J. Hooker

8. Beyoncé Knowles is being considered for the role of Wonder Woman in the planned big-screen adaptation of the DC Comics superhero.

(a) True
(b) False

9. Johnny Depp is set to star in his eighth film — and sixth adaptation/remake/”reimagining” — for director Tim Burton. What is it?

(a) “My Fair Lady”
(b) “Dark Shadows”
(c) “Houdini”
(d) “To Kill a Mockingbird”

10. Megan Fox and Kristen Stewart will star in a remake of 1991’s Thelma & Louise.

(a) True
(b) False

BONUS: Which of the following movie-news items is real?

(a) “A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas” is being developed for a 2010 release.
(b) Director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero) is remaking the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple and relocating the action to a Chinese noodle shop.
(c) Will Smith is in preliminary talks to star in “City That Sailed” as a New York City dad whose love for his daughter overseas is so strong that Manhattan begins to float over to her side of the Atlantic.
(d) all of the above
(e) none of the above

Thanks to Tamara Faulkner for the initial idea, and Arend Anton, Bob Cashill, Jeff Giles, Jason Hare, Jeff Johnson, Scott Malchus, and Kelly Stitzel for contributing various news items.

I realized the other day that it’s been a couple months since I updated you on my personal life. No one’s asked for an update, of course, but I figured the fan letter that said “Send me the music from Running Scarred because I dont know how to use the internet except for email and this is the first time I have used email – I swear – so please hurry” was probably from a non-English speaker who really meant to say, “How’s your girlfriend, Aimiee, and the child you abandoned in Nebraska last fall?”

Well, I have good and bad news about Xing, our adopted son who’s really our daughter. The good news is she’s doing really well for herself in Lincoln, Nebraska, having been accepted for early enrollment at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln at the tender age of seven. She’s also reclaimed her natural name of Zhen, along with the gender Aimiee and I denied her. (Every parent makes mistakes. Don’t judge our gender reassignment until you’ve seen for yourself how it can have an unexpected negative side.)

As is the case with almost all children, Zhen got bored while waiting for school to start, so she took advantage of her free time and created a new iPhone application. Her “app” tells you how much longer you’ll be able to hold out before you break down and buy the latest iPhone.

I’m so proud of my little boy-girl! She’s all grown up now. This bird has flown, it’s time to let her make her own mistakes, we set the bar as low as possible as parents so she’d have nowhere to go but up, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. Of course her new family in Lincoln still sees her as a seven-year-old who needs love and attention and discipline, even if she is a genius, but frankly I think that’s an insult to someone of her caliber.

So now Aimiee and I are childless again, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want companionship. Recently we adopted a basset hound at the local animal shelter, and on a whim we named her Baby, which probably won’t be good for her self-esteem in the long run. She keeps looking at us with those big, wet eyes, making us feel guilty about our decision. Recently I caught Baby eating some DVDs I bought years ago but still haven’t watched; I was pretty mad, so I made her feel guilty as hell about it. At that point I assumed we were even.

But in June I read a story in the Chicago Sun-Times that said guilt isn’t part of a dog’s emotional vocabulary. According to Alexandra Horowitz, an assistant professor at Barnard College in New York, dog owners merely see guilt in their pets’ eyes when a canine crime’s been committed, or even when they just suspect one’s been committed. Dogs are nothing more than remorseless DVD-eating machines. Or maybe Baby’s act of violence was her way of saying I should switch to Blu-ray.

I also read an Associated Press report that said half of all American pet owners “consider their pets as much a part of the family as any other person in the household,” and “nearly a third let them sleep in a human bed.” Aimiee and I haven’t gone that far, but we have made significant progress in teaching Baby how to make our bed. I’m not sure if she’ll ever understand “hospital corners,” but it’s still quite a trick.

Aimiee and I would love for Baby to meet Zhen, but not as some sort of pathetic attempt to make Zhen jealous, if that’s what you’re thinking. Okay, maybe a little jealous. Or just guilty for not coming back to us after I abandoned her. I know children can be made to feel guilty. And if they make dogs fight and their name is Michael Vick, they can be found guilty too.

In order for our dog who we wish was a baby to meet our daughter who we wished was our son, we would probably drive to Lincoln after flying from Wheeling, Illinois, into Denver on Pet Airways, which took its first flight on Tuesday. The new airline, operated by husband and wife Dan Wiesel and Alysa Binder, caters exclusively to pets, who travel in the main cabin of Pet Airways’ jets in carriers that take the place of regular human seats. And according to the AP, “at each of the five airports it serves, the company has created a ‘Pet Lounge’ for future fliers to wait and sniff before flights.” Who says air travel is nothing more than elevated blood pressure, nonexistent leg room, and racial profiling? Pet Airways, that’s who.

Getting back to the subject of hot new iPhone apps, my lawyer/friend Dave-o has a client who’s almost as smart as Zhen. Let’s call him “Walt” for the time being. He’s invented an app that can translate dogs’ thoughts into English, just like in the movie Up, except the translation shows up as text on your iPhone, not as dialogue emanating from an electronic collar. Therefore the two ideas are completely different and there’s no need for Pixar and Disney’s platoon of lawyers to send me any threatening letters.

I tested out the app on Dave-o’s three-year-old black Lab, Murray, but I’m not sure he’s going to like what his talkative pooch had to say …

Hi! Hello! My name is Murray! It’s good to be here! Hello! I’m glad to be talking to you!

Okay okay okay, I will calm down now. I will sit. I am catching my breath now. What a funny thing to say — “catching my breath.” I can sometimes catch a Frisbee, but I do not know how to “catch” my breath. Maybe it’s like chasing a car or chasing your tail — you’ll never catch it, even if you live to be 15!

I have so much to say!

Okay, I need some water now.

Ah, that was good. That was very good. I was so thirsty.

I am still thirsty. I need some more water.

Okay, now– hey, what’s that on the TV?! Oh, it’s a grasshopper. Never mind. I really am sorry for the delay. Or am I?

Hahaha, that was a joke, because dogs don’t feel guilty about things, remember? Here’s what I think — if you look at a dog and you think he looks guilty, he probably just ate a grasshopper. Trust me, I should know.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the phone! I want to talk about the phone!

My master is always using his phone. Inside the house, outside the house, in the car, in the park. Everywhere! Even the man who used to bring the newspaper was always on the phone. Who was he talking to that early in the morning? I would ask him, but I never see him now that my master reads all the news off his phone. (Does that mean “Go on the paper” now means “Go on the phone”? No, it does not. Let me repeat — no, it does not.)

One time I met an old, tiny dog named Ricardo. He told me the phone used to just be in the house. Then someone cut the cord off it and people started taking the phone everywhere. And then they started using it everywhere.

Ricardo says people get lonely and that’s why they talk on the phone so much. But dogs get lonely too. So if our masters just talked to us, none of us would be lonely, yes? Everybody would be happy.

(Excuse me for a second. I really have to lick this one place. It’s kind of become an obsession. Okay, done.)

I will ask you a question now — can a phone sit at your feet while you watch the baseball game? I wanted to know, so that is why I picked up my master’s phone with my teeth and dropped it at his feet last week. He got mad and said I broke it. I didn’t mean to! (No, I did not feel guilty.) But now maybe he will see how easy it is to break your best friend. (This dog’s a poet! —RC)

I am not saying you should never talk on the phone when I am with you. That would be bitchy.

Hahaha, that was a joke. Okay, it was sort of a joke. But sometimes I think if you didn’t have that leash I could walk off and you would never notice. And sometimes when you’re on the phone and you are not paying attention and you walk me out into the middle of the street and a car almost hits us, I wonder which one of us belongs on that leash. (He’s a philosopher too! —RC)

If you only talked on the phone while I’m doing my business, that would be okay. I do not like when you watch me. You don’t watch me, I won’t watch you. I promise I was not watching you that time you thought I was watching you. I can’t be blamed if you won’t close the door. You get distracted very easily when you’re talking on the– hey, what’s that on the TV?! Oh, it’s a car that is on fire. That looks pretty. A little scary, but pretty. Now a man is yelling on a phone in front of the car that is on fire. Everybody is on the phone all the time.

Where was I? Oh yes, our walks!

My master used to talk to me when he’d take me on a walk. Oh, the things we’d talk about! We talked about baseball and tennis balls and Frisbees, and cats and clouds and clouds that are shaped like cats, and fleas and ticks and worms, and little boys and girls who pet too hard and how I could stick my nose somewhere they didn’t want me to if I wanted them to go away.

My master and I were best friends! Now his phone is his best friend. But I bet that phone can’t tell you any funny jokes about all the new bulldogs in our neighborhood. (Q: Why do all bulldogs automatically go to heaven? A: Because it’s not fair they have to go through life looking like hell.)

What happened to our time, master? I promise I would not ignore you if you were me and I was you. And don’t say it will never happen, because Ricardo says his master used to say that people would never buy computers they could use at home. Now they can’t go two minutes without checking their computer mail on their phones.

Dogs can’t use phones or computers, so we will never ignore our masters to talk to our dog friends instead, but here I am talking in English and you are understanding it. Tomorrow, the world!

No, I am joking. But if we did take over the world, remember, we would not feel guilty about treating you like squirrels.

I have to yawn now. That felt good! I am tired.

I will stop talking now. But I am talking for dogs everywhere when I say that we just want our masters to pay more attention to us, especially when we go on walks. You are our best friend, and you will always be our best friend. We hope we are still yours. So please do not ignore us. Talk to us and rub our bellies and we will give you more love than any phone ever could. We can even vibrate if you curl up close enough to our– hey, what’s that on the TV?! Oh, it’s just an ad for a phone. Yeah, like the world needs more of that.

Dave-o’s dog even knows the rule of threes! Wow. If Pet Airways doesn’t watch out, soon its passengers will be flying the planes themselves.

Sly & the Family Stone, “Dog” (from 1967’s A Whole New Thing)
Tito Puente, “Lucky Dog” (from 1997’s The Best of Tito Puente: El Rey del Timbal!)
Ben Folds, “Dog [Alternate Version]“ (from 2006’s Supersunnyspeedgraphic, the LP)
Lou Donaldson, “Hot Dog” (from 1969’s Hot Dog)
Matt the Electrician, “My Dog” (from 2006’s One Thing Right)
Eugene Mirman, “Dogs” (from 2006’s En Garde, Society!)

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing opened in theaters on June 30, 1989, and as he told the Associated Press recently about the film’s controversial climax, “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the [trash] can through the window. Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.”

Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.

It didn’t have to be O.J., who wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of black pride. And it wasn’t that every black person in America thought he was innocent. But, as Boyd noted on ESPN.com two years ago when discussing Barry Bonds’s home-run record, “acquittal in a court of law was trumped by conviction in the court of public opinion” in the following decade. Now Simpson is behind bars, for armed robbery and kidnapping — the verdict in that 2007 case was handed down exactly 13 years after he was acquitted for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and it’d be difficult to believe that the jury wasn’t influenced by the general perception that Simpson had gotten off scot-free in the ’90s.

The black community had a similar, though more muted, reaction when Michael Jackson was found innocent of child molestation in 2005: “the powers that be” had failed to bring down another rich and famous black man who had risen to the top of his profession. (R&B star R. Kelly, who wrote Jackson’s 1995 hit “You Are Not Alone,” was acquitted of 14 counts of child pornography last year. So far, his career hasn’t been affected the way Jackson’s was.) But the biggest musical star of his generation wasn’t a symbol of black pride, either, at least not on the outside: since the mid-’80s his skin color had become lighter and lighter, his hair straighter and straighter, and his nose smaller and smaller due to an overabundance of plastic surgery. In 2002, when he accused his record label, Sony Music, of not supporting its black artists, the standard joke was “Who is this white woman and why is she calling Tommy Mottola a racist?”

“The second phase of his career was where it became much murkier,” Los Angeles community activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson told the AP. “He became much more ambivalent in the minds of many African-Americans. His music, his whole change in appearance, his fan base became much more eclectic. You just didn’t see African-Americans identifying with him.” Jackson even seemed to foreshadow his troubles in his 1982 song “Billie Jean”: “Be careful of what you do ’cause the lie becomes the truth.”

However, when the news of his death quickly spread across the globe last Thursday, the reaction from black Americans was no longer muted. At the Sweet Holy Spirit Church on Chicago’s south side three days later, church elder Sandra Rowe told the Chicago Sun-Times, “Even though I didn’t have any of his music, I still feel like I’ve lost a son.” And in Sunday’s New York Times, Marcus Mabry wrote: “In scores of interviews across the country over the weekend, few [African-Americans] expressed the kind of resentment some once had for his strangeness, his changing appearance, his distance from the cherubic Michael of the Jackson 5.

“Darrell Smith, 40, a filmmaker in Brooklyn, recalled that ‘when his skin started getting lighter,’ many black people said Mr. Jackson did not want to be black.

“Now, he said: ‘I honestly feel like I lost a brother. It’s a pain inside me.’”

(I found out Jackson had died when I received an e-mail from my girlfriend, who was on public transportation here in Chicago when she found out. “Dumbfounded: on the TRAIN the conductor just announced m jackson’s heart attack and death,” she wrote. The conductor was black.)

The gut reaction to Jackson’s death was, in a sense, summed up by actor-singer Jamie Foxx at Sunday’s BET Awards ceremony, which was quickly overhauled to include a tribute to Jackson. As he told the audience, “No need to be sad. We want to celebrate this black man. He belongs to us and we shared him with everybody else.”

In other words, you didn’t get this one — we let you have him. And those of us who got to share him were grateful for it.

As many commentators have pointed out, Jackson is best remembered through his work, especially from 1969 to 1982, when he was creating some of the best pop and R&B songs of all time with his brothers and as a solo performer. By the time his friend Elizabeth Taylor nicknamed him “the King of Pop” in 1989 he was past his creative prime, but from ‘82 to ‘84, when Thriller ruled the radio and MTV, there was no bigger star — for blacks, for whites, for anybody. We all agreed on Michael Jackson.

And then the moment passed.

Barack Obama’s historic ascent from first-term senator to president of the United States last year has been compared to Jackson’s crossover popularity in the ’80s, but he’s a politician — you’ll never get everyone to agree on him. (Plus his voice is deep, so he’s automatically more threatening than Jackson ever was at his peak.) Or Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor, for that matter, because eight years ago she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Rush Limbaugh — who’s never ever never said a remotely bigoted thing in his life — was outraged! Was Judge Sotomayor suggesting he could never become a Latina no matter how much Mexican food he eats? (For the record, I, Robert Cass, am not a racist. One of my best friends is Mexican food.)

The talk-radio host called Sotomayor a racist, and though Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) doesn’t agree, he does think she should apologize for her 2001 statement, which suggests that “all the hardships she has gone through makes her better than me.”

So this is what Capitol Hill politics has boiled down to: “You think you’re better ‘n me? Huh? You think you’re better ‘n me?!” Nothing more than drunks at a dive bar challenging newcomers to a fight, or insecure rappers (influenced by Michael Jackson’s pop-soul innovations, no less) defending their sonic turf.

Luckily, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) came to Judge Sotomayor’s defense, saying, “As long as you put rule of law first, of course, it’s quite natural to understand that our experiences affect us. I don’t think anybody wants nine justices on the Supreme Court who have ice water in their veins.”

“Ice water”? What does he mean by that? Wait a second — is this Schumer’s way of saying Sotomayor is a hot-blooded Latina?

Oh my god, that’s so racist!

But we can all be happy that she’s much more qualified than Justice Clarence Thomas was when he was nominated for the bench in ‘91.

Hey, that’s racist too! He’s black!

No, it’s not, it’s a fact.

Okay, you‘re right!

Yep, there’s still plenty to get riled up about. Race is an incredibly sensitive subject, after all. Which is why comedians are still having trouble ripping a new one in President Obama. It’s not that he’s “perfect,” as was alleged last summer by late-night talk-show comedy writers — most of whom are white — which is a polite way of saying “Black presidential candidate equals ‘no touchy with ten-foot pole.’” The Daily Show’s “senior black correspondent,” Larry Wilmore, who also created The Bernie Mac Show, said in January, in a Gannett News Service wire story, that it “is a challenge … Everything is so put together. Maybe it’ll be making fun of how humorless he is.”

But he’s not humorless. He may not be a trained comedian, but he delivers a joke better than George W. Bush ever could. However, Wilmore did add, “People just can’t be afraid of offending because he is black; he is half white, and you can always make fun of that.”

Or, if you’re black comedian Wanda Sykes, you just make fun of Obama’s detractors, including Rush Limbaugh, as she did at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in May, even though every previous guest comedian at the event has taken the opportunity to roast the president. It’s pretty much expected. Wanda, you’re black and gay — at least shred him to pieces for not speeding along gay-rights legislation!

You’d better watch how you draw the president, too. In February, the AP’s Jesse Washington wrote about how political cartoonists are nubbing up lots of erasers these days, going out of their way to avoid making Obama look like a stereotype in their drawings. Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz (La Cucaracha) was showing a classroom of black and Latino students how he draws the presidents, and when he got to Obama, who he voted for, a black girl said, “Hey, those lips are big.” He told Washington he was jarred by the incident: “I try to bend over backwards not to make him look like a cartoon stereotype.”

The AP story was prompted by an infamous New York Post cartoon published in February that made people of all colors do a double take: In Sean Delonas’s one-panel drawing, two police officers are seen standing over a dead chimpanzee. One cop says to the other, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Get it?

Yeah, me neither.

A runaway chimpanzee was shot dead by police in Stamford, Connecticut, in February, but what does that have to do with President Obama’s stimulus package? Col Allan, editor-in-chief of the Post, said in a statement, “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.”

Do you get it now?

Yeah, me neither.

But how about Michael Bay’s sense of humor? He’s the director of box-office bonanzas like Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Bad Boys II, Transformers, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which opened last Wednesday and made more than $200 million in its first five days of release despite scathing reviews.

Some of those reviews pointed out the comic relief in the film, twin robots named Skids and Mudflap, who “constantly brawl and bicker in rap-inspired street slang,” according to the AP. “They’re forced to acknowledge that they can’t read. One has a gold tooth.” They’ve been compared to Jar Jar Binks, the universally-despised-unless-you’re-two-years-old alien sidekick in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, the number-one movie of 1999. Jar Jar spoke with a Rastafarian patois and in turn was compared by many critics and viewers to Stepin Fetchit, a character played by black actor Lincoln Perry in Depression-era films who reinforced negative stereotypes.

Jar Jar was, for the most part, a digital creation, inserted into The Phantom Menace alongside actors like Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor, but his voice was provided by Ahmed Best, who’s black. Similarly, Reno Wilson, who voices Mudflap in the Transformers sequel, is black, but Skids is voiced by Tom Kenny, a white stand-up and sketch comic who also voices SpongeBob SquarePants on TV.

“We’re just putting more personality in,” Bay said about the characters. “I don’t know if it’s stereotypes — they are robots, by the way. These are the voice actors. This is kind of the direction they were taking the characters and we went with it.”

Yeah, way to pass the buck, Mike. (Steven Spielberg, the director of 1985’s The Color Purple and 1997’s Amistad, is an executive producer of both Transformers films. One of his next directing projects is rumored to be a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic. So, way to drop the ball, Steve!)

However, one viewer of the Transformers sequel told the AP, “It’s one thing when robot cars are racial stereotypes, but the movie also had a bucktoothed black guy who is briefly in one scene who’s also a stereotype.”

It’s not the first time Bay has used black caricatures in his films. In The Rock (1996), during Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery’s car chase through the streets of San Francisco, the black conductor of a trolley car loses control of his vehicle and loudly whimpers, “Earthquake! Save yourselves!” and “Oh, my baby!”

You can see part of that scene at Time Out New York’s website, where “the top five Michael Bay explosions” are counted down and The Rock is commended for expressing right-wing politics through stunts: Connery drives a Humvee that “plows through a peace-sign-laden VW Beetle, totals a truck of bottled water and, finally, derails the ultimate symbol of socialist conveyance: the trolley car.” In his next film, Armageddon (1998), Bay destroyed Paris, home of those white-flag-wavin’ culture snobs, while comedian Eddie Griffin fulfilled the duties of Loud Black Man Who Says Things Like “Oh, Hell Naw!” in a small part near the beginning of the film.

Griffin paved the way for Law & Order’s Anthony Anderson in Transformers (2007), who’s supposed to be funny because not only is he a screaming coward, he’s also fat. In addition, the movie features black actor Darius McCrary as the voice of an Autobot named Jazz, who uses lots of hip-hop slang in his speech; like many black supporting characters in action and horror films (metallic or otherwise) who aren’t the comic relief, he dies before the movie’s over. Last but not least, Indian call-center employees are exposed as the nose pickers we’ve always suspected them to be.

Who’s up next in the Michael Bay film festival of positive black role models? Why, it’s Martin Lawrence, star of Bad Boys (1995) and Bad Boys II (2003). Lawrence plays one of the two leads in these buddy-cop films, unlike Griffin or Anderson in their Bay movies, but Will Smith gets to be the “cool” protagonist — Lawrence’s primary objective is to bug his eyes out at his partner and contort his face. Yes, Jim Carrey does the same thing in his comedies, but he’s never forced to play second banana, not even in Batman Forever (1995), where the villains were treated with more respect than the title character.

As for the right-wing quotient of Bad Boys II, Smith and Lawrence destroy a Cuban shantytown during a car chase. (Have fun picking up the pieces of your shattered lives, dirt-poor commies!) Bay pretends he’s Hollywood-liberal by having his bad boys bust up a Ku Klux Klan rally at the beginning of the film, just as he tries to have his cake and eat it too in Transformers by making Anthony Anderson an overweight wuss who’s also a brilliant computer hacker, but he ain’t foolin’ me.

The trailer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen did deliver one good laugh — the film’s giant robots are seen destroying a library. Make sure you smash that copy of Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) in the video section if it hasn’t already been checked out, okay, Decepticons? No one needs to learn about American history via Ben Affleck’s frosted tips. (Time Out Chicago’s Ben Kenigsberg calls Bay’s style “a type of filmmaking that rises above guilty pleasure but also falls short of what we might call defensible.”)

Clearly, Bay could use some racial-sensitivity training, though he’s managed to evade the disapproving glares of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson so far. And it’s not as if black audiences have stayed away from the Bad Boys and Transformers movies in droves.

Maybe he should just be spanked for his ass-backward sense of humor. But since he’s white, his mom probably doesn’t condone that sort of punishment the way many black families do. (Besides, he’s 44 years old. She’s got better things to do.) Some say it’s abuse, others say it’s necessary discipline. Back in March, Mary Mitchell, a black columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote about Cathleen Schandelmeier-Bartels, a white woman who alleged she was fired from her job at Chicago’s South Shore Cultural Center in 2006 because she reported the “bathroom whupping” of a six-year-old black boy by his aunt to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services; when she told a black coworker about the incident, she says she was told, “It’s a black thing — we beat our children.”

Schandelmeier-Bartels sued for discrimination and was awarded $200,000 by a federal jury, but as Mitchell wrote, “While all blacks don’t beat their children, and all whites don’t view spankings as abuse, we do seem to be divided … Obviously, spanking is not a ‘black thing,’ although it is perceived as such by many … [but there] is a difference between physically disciplining a child and abusing one.”

Michael Jackson accused his father, Joseph, of physical abuse, but his older brother Jermaine defended their father’s actions in a 2005 interview with Larry King. “We grew up like any other black family. You did something, you got your butt tore up … you got a spanking,” he said, and added, “He kept us off of the streets.”

When Spike Lee, who directed the minstrel-show satire Bamboozled in 2000, was asked by the AP’s Jesse Washington how he felt about race in America now that we have a (half) black president, he replied, “I’ll tell you one statement I don’t agree with: Post-racial society. What does that mean? That we’re past it? We’re not there, we’re definitely not there. Those are people wishing upon a star. It’s not like it’s gonna be presto change-o, abracadabra, Obama Obama — it doesn’t work like that.” On June 18 the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for slavery, which is nice in theory, but it sounds like it may amount to nothing more than a letter from the government sent to every black citizen that says, “Our bad, y’all.”

Do the Right Thing was financed and distributed by Universal Pictures. Paramount had offered Lee a bigger budget, but the studio wanted a different ending. “They just couldn’t understand why Mookie throws the trash can through Sal’s window,” said Tom Pollock, the former Universal executive who green-lit the film. “Quite honestly, I didn’t understand either, until it was explained to me by Spike.” (He was trying to hit Michael Bay.) Pollock, as you can probably guess, is white. And Paramount distributed both Transformers movies.

The opening credits of Do the Right Thing are scored to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” which contains the following lyrics: “Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me, you see / Straight-out racist, the sucker was simple and plain / Motherfuck him and John Wayne.”

I wasn’t even two years old when Elvis Presley, “the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” died, but I don’t believe he was a racist. I’m not black, of course, but these things are rarely black and white, so to speak. But as Little Richard, another rock ‘n’ roll original, said in his cameo on Living Colour’s “Elvis Is Dead” (1990): “Presley was a good performer / Onstage he was electrifying / When he was ill his fans got sick / And moaned when he had died / To all you pimps makin’ money on his name / How do you sleep? Don’t you feel ashamed? / He went through the test, he’s out of this mess / Be my guest and let him rest.”

I was too young for Elvis, but I was there during the King of Pop’s reign. Michael Jackson didn’t transcend race, but for a while his music did, and that will always be worth celebrating.

Now let him rest.

The Jackson 5, “ABC” (from 1994’s Crooklyn: Volume 1 soundtrack)
Public Enemy, “Fight the Power” (from 1995’s Def Jam: 10th Year Anniversary)
Living Colour, “Elvis Is Dead” (from 1990’s Time’s Up)
The Jacksons, “Heartbreak Hotel” (a.k.a. “This Place Hotel”) (from 1980’s Triumph)
Michael Jackson, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough [1978 Demo]“ (from 2001’s Off the Wall: Special Edition)

In February 2007 The New Yorker published “Whatever It Takes,” an article by Jane Mayer about the Fox series 24, and how the politically conservative views of the show’s creators, Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, have influenced its use of torture scenes. “The truth is, there’s a certain amount of fatigue. It’s getting hard not to repeat the same torture techniques over and over,” said Howard Gordon, the show’s head writer, or “showrunner,” who described himself as a “moderate Democrat.”

In that same month, Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, announced he was running for president, while on 24 there was already a black president in the White House: Wayne Palmer, the brother of ex-president David Palmer, who was assassinated in season five. That’s right — two black presidents in a span of three fictional terms of office. Pretty liberal, huh? (Author and NPR favorite Sarah Vowell is a fan, and former Air America radio host Janeane Garofalo was a regular cast member this past season.) And how about all those scenes of indestructible government agent Jack Bauer using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” forcing terrorist suspects to talk so he can find whatever ticking time bomb is set to go off before the end of each season? Pretty right-wing, huh? (Rush Limbaugh’s a fan — and a good friend of Surnow’s — and Senator John McCain made a cameo in season five.)

24 is a bleeding-heart-liberal show soaked in the blood of our freedom-hating enemies. Everybody wins! Everybody except the show’s fans, who, regardless of their personal politics, know the once riveting show’s best days are behind it, and not just because the post-9/11 cultural zeitgeist can no longer lend 24 the kind of collective-unconscious off-screen urgency it used to. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury summed it up nicely in a strip earlier this month, in which a CIA applicant who asks about “ticking time-bomb exemptions” is told, “Everyone’s over ‘24.’” The truth is, there’s a certain amount of fatigue on both sides of the screen when it comes to the long-running series.

Yet time isn’t up for 24 in the sense that terrorism and torture are still hot topics in the news and on editorial pages around the world. One of President Obama’s first official acts in office, one that was hailed by the left and condemned by the right, was ordering the January 2010 shutdown of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where methods of “enhanced interrogation,” such as waterboarding, have reportedly been used on terrorist suspects since they were first approved by the Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks.

The president has faced setbacks, though. Without a clear plan in place from his administration for closing the prison and transferring its detainees to “supermax”-security facilities on U.S. soil, the Senate voted 90-6 on May 20 to block funding for the project, meaning those suspects won’t be going anywhere for a while.

Hooray! The world is safe from alleged evil once again! Or is it? (No. Alleged evil is always a threat — allegedly.)

24 spent a great deal of time this past season — its seventh — defending Jack Bauer’s (Kiefer Sutherland) use of torture, beginning with a Senate subcommittee hearing condemning Jack’s illegal actions in the name of patriotism. But in every instance in which our hero used “enhanced interrogation techniques” against the objections of President Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones) or his FBI colleagues, he got the information they wouldn’t have gotten through gentler, legal methods. So even though 24’s showrunner told The New Yorker two years ago that torture scenes were becoming a crutch for the show’s writers, they were still willing to defend Jack’s right to be sadistic to the bitter end this season, even if it meant lots of redundant scenes of Jack essentially saying, “Told you so!”

In Mayer’s New Yorker article, cocreator Robert Cochran said, “Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.” U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan went further and pointed out that in real life a fanatical Islamic terrorist wouldn’t be fazed by a Jack Bauer type doing “whatever it takes” to make him talk as time runs out: “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory — the ticking time bomb will go off!” On 24, Jack is the only character who never “breaks,” even after 20 months of torture in a Chinese prison between seasons five and six.

On May 21, the day after the Senate’s vote, President Obama spoke at the National Archives, defending his original plan to shut down Gitmo and still pledging to transfer some of its occupants to the U.S., while admitting that “prolonged detention” of dangerous terrorism suspects who can’t be tried is “the toughest issue we face.” (Earlier, on May 15, he said he would restart Gitmo military tribunals, which he had once opposed, by September.)

Elsewhere in D.C. that day, former vice president Dick Cheney spoke at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and implied that the current administration’s security policies are making the nation vulnerable to another terrorist attack. Columnist David Brooks pointed out in the New York Times the following day that the Bush administration tried to close Gitmo during the president’s second term as Cheney’s power was beginning to wane, and that it was the CIA, not the Obama administration, that tried to put an end to waterboarding as early as 2003. But as Cheney said in his televised speech last Thursday, when dealing with terrorists there can be “no middle ground.”

Meanwhile, under the ground in North Korea on Monday, a nuclear bomb went off. It was the country’s second nuclear test, despite the U.S. and the UN sending leader Kim Jong-il to bed without supper after the first one in 2006. Now U.S. officials are worried that Naughty Korea’s nuclear arsenal might fall into the hands of terrorists — like the Taliban fighters who’ve attacked three cities in Pakistan over the past couple days, perhaps? And doesn’t Pakistan have the bomb too? And how’s that uranium enrichment coming along in Iran?

Yes, these are still nerve-jangling times, even without the economy to worry about, but to give credit where credit is due, detonating that bomb was a clever move on Kim Jong-il’s part, seeing as how 24’s seventh season ended on May 18 with Jack lying in a coma, waiting to die from an incurable disease brought about by exposure to a lethal bioweapon. Until he wakes up, bad guys around the world, real or otherwise, are free to do whatever they want.

Crack open a nondomestic brewski — it’s Militant Time!

When Jane Mayer’s article ran in The New Yorker in 2007, 24 was a month into its sixth season, riding high after winning the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in the fall of ‘06. The accolade was well deserved, but the award-winning fifth season did quite a bit of damage to the series down the road in its quest to raise the creative stakes as high as they could possibly go. By killing off former series regulars like President Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) and Michelle Dessler (Reiko Aylesworth) in the opening minutes of that season, followed in subsequent episodes by the deaths of shy intelligence analyst Edgar Stiles (Louis Lombardi) and the Counter Terrorist Unit’s number-two hunk, Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) — at least until he resurfaced this season, alive and kicking and shooting and killing, and providing the one genuine shocker of the year when he revealed his true intentions — the show became a cannibal, feeding off the dead to keep itself alive.

I read an article during season five — I’m sorry to say I can’t find it now — about the impact of this decade’s reality shows on scripted shows: viewers who liked Survivor, The Bachelor, and other programs in which a contestant is voted off each week had started to expect the same from serial dramas like 24 and Lost. (The same could even be said for movies like X-Men: The Last Stand, which came out at the tail end of 24’s fifth season and killed off several of its heroes from the previous two installments.) But reality-show fame seekers are a dime a dozen; well-rounded characters aren’t. By thinning out its ranks for the sake of a few good shocks and emotional death scenes, 24 suffered in the long run.

Sutherland even claimed that he wouldn’t mind Jack being killed off if that’s what it took to keep the show from becoming predictable, but that development seemed unlikely. The story is the main attraction, but Sutherland is 24’s star, and Jack was one of the best characters on TV before he was turned into Jesus at the beginning of season six, complete with long hair and a beard, after being tortured in China. His initials are one letter away from “J.C.,” but J.B. is the name of Archibald MacLeish’s play based on the Book of Job, and Jack Bauer certainly qualifies as a man who’s had his faith — in God and country — tested.

His initials are also the same as those of Jason Bourne, Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac assassin who debuted on movie screens in The Bourne Identity a few weeks after 24’s first season ended. Together they became the template for the decade’s dominant action hero: physically lethal but emotionally damaged, with a complete absence of James Bond-style one-liners. Speaking of that other J.B., Bauer and Bourne’s influence could be felt in the most recent Bond film, 2008’s mediocre Quantum of Solace.

Jack has seen his fair share of death, including the demise of his wife, Teri (Leslie Hope), in the final seconds of season one; his bad brother and worse father (more on them in a minute); and many of his friends and colleagues. In some ways he’s already been dead for years, having numbed himself to the psychic pain that’s always right around the corner. Bullets have never stopped him, but that bioweapon looked like it would give him a chance to finally rest in peace. He was exposed to its nerve gas in the episode that aired March 23, but his cause for concern was a cause for celebration among viewers who’ve been watching 24 since it debuted and who suddenly had hope that it could go out with the biggest bang of them all — the death of its reluctant yet relentless hero.

Unfortunately, on March 24 it was announced that 24 would be returning for an eighth season, with Sutherland in tow. Longtime viewers knew the show wasn’t surprising them on-screen like it used to, but now it was clear it didn’t care about surprising them off-screen either. To quote the title of a more recent addition to Fox’s lineup: Lie to me! At least pretend there’s a chance he could die!

After being estranged from his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), for several seasons, they reconciled when she discovered she’s Jack’s only hope for surviving the disease. But the potential cure involves a risky stem-cell procedure, and the season finale ended with Kim defying her father’s wishes to save him. It’s safe to guess that when season eight begins next January, Kim will have died to save her father, giving 24 a reason to keep going with Sutherland at the helm, as well as giving Jack yet another reason to quietly suffer at the hands of fate — and the clock.

But you know what’s nice about being a government agent who suffers quietly? You can drown out the silence by making terrorist suspects suffer loudly. Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies on CBS’s Face the Nation on May 10, saying that “perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives” were potentially saved by their “intelligent interrogation program,” i.e. torture. (His wife, Lynne, is an avowed fan of 24, whose debut was delayed for several weeks after 9/11 because of its terrorism-focused storyline.)

Joe Conason of Salon.com believes, however, that Bush and Cheney’s thumbs-up to torture was mainly used to justify their invasion of oil-rich Iraq in 2003. In particular, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former State Department aide to Colin Powell, said that when “harsh interrogation” was given the green light in the spring of ‘02, “its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida.”

A similar blood-for-oil plot was used in 24’s fifth season in 2006, but the president, Charles Logan (the terrific Gregory Itzin), was aghast when he discovered a top aide was behind the plot — except it turned out Logan himself was complicit in planned terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, giving 24 the chance to play off the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job.

The president was brought down at the end of the season, and because Itzin resembles Richard Nixon, it was easy to think the show’s writers were having fun with the notion of using a former president who believed nothing’s illegal if the commander-in-chief does it and transferring his likeness to the then-current president, who shared Nixon’s philosophy. (Even though 24 doesn’t reveal its characters’ political-party affiliations, if you accept that David Palmer was a Democrat, that would make Logan, originally the VP to Palmer’s successor, a Republican.)

The popular belief that President Bush was merely a puppet controlled by Cheney or a “shadow government” was also addressed: Logan answered to mysterious power mongers, one of whom was identified the following season as Jack’s brother, Graem (Paul McCrane). And that’s when 24 really went off the deep end.

The idea of mysterious billionaires controlling the White House’s every move is tons of fun, especially on a suspense drama like 24, but once a variation on Cain and Abel was introduced in season six, pitting self-sacrificing patriot Jack against self-serving Graem, who also considered himself a patriot (the American bad guys on 24 always do — the mark of a good villain is that he believes in his cause, but it’s grown stale in this setting), it felt far too convenient in thematic terms. As Howard Gordon said to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2007, “I told the writers, ‘This is probably a crazy, terrible idea, but what if Jack’s brother is Paul McCrane?’ It was preposterous, but almost instantly, we all decided it was too good to resist.” No, you were right the first time.

Graem was just a weasel, though, not truly evil. That adjective went to his and Jack’s father, Phillip (James Cromwell), who was also involved in the conspiracy from season five. After Jack tortured Graem to get him to talk about the “suitcase nuke” that had gone off in Los Angeles earlier in the day, Phillip killed his youngest son so he couldn’t spill any more beans. (Funny, the Bauers don’t look Greek.) At that point I prayed Jack’s mom gave him lots of hugs when he was little, because I’m pretty sure he killed the bogeyman in self-defense at age seven, thus beginning his lifelong quest to win the war on terror.

Maybe it’s just a case of the novelty having finally worn off, the formula exhausted. When 24 debuted six weeks after 9/11, it wasn’t an instant hit, either because terrorism-as-escapism wasn’t most people’s idea of comfort TV at the time or because the show’s unique format — 24 episodes, each played out in “real time” and representing one hour of an entire day — demanded that viewers pay attention and keep up each week. The format caught on, though, inspiring similar “serial” dramas like ABC’s Lost, Fox’s Prison Break, and NBC’s Heroes.

In some ways it’s a miracle 24 was as good as it was for as long as it was, especially since the real-time gimmick doesn’t allow for flashbacks, slow-motion gunplay, or even internal-monologue-style scenes in which Jack pieces the previous episodes’ clues together in his mind. The show’s producers considered switching to a format of self-contained episodes in season two, like what you see on CSI and its various spin-offs, but they decided to stick with their “hook,” and although 24 occasionally derailed in its first five seasons with plot developments like Teri’s amnesia or Kim’s bad habit of attracting hungry mountain lions — female characters on 24, especially in the early years, were often portrayed as either helpless, conniving, or just plain evil — its locomotive narrative quickly got back on track.

But when your show develops a reputation for being unpredictable, it has to be difficult to constantly keep viewers on their toes, especially after you reach 100 episodes. 24’s unpredictability has become entirely predictable by now — Fox’s tagline of “So Dangerous” in promos this past season was laughable, unless of course you’re an anti-torture advocate like Patrick Finnegan (or Janeane Garofalo, who, when asked by Time Out Chicago if she thinks she has a responsibility not to cash checks from a show that goes against her outspoken political views, gave an unsatisfactory answer: “If there is, I didn’t live up to it … so I have disappointed that standard”) — making it difficult to overlook repetitive subplots involving government moles or interoffice love affairs, whether they’re happening at CTU headquarters in L.A. or FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where season seven took place. In fact the current he-said, she-said drama surrounding Nancy Pelosi’s knowledge of waterboarding in 2002 feels like an underwritten 24 subplot that would be quickly abandoned after a few episodes.

Plus, this season’s attack on the White House by African terrorists was a retread of the three attacks on CTU headquarters in previous seasons. You wouldn’t think a counterterrorism agency would be so easy to break into, but since I used to make my Star Wars action figures travel to a third Death Star of my own creation when I was ten years old, I won’t pretend that 24 is easy to write. It’s just that narrative invention is no longer one of the show’s strengths.

(Like Star Wars, 24 is layered enough to inspire fan curiosity about its characters’ origins: the possibility of a spin-off series or movie featuring a much younger Jack during his days in the military might be a good way to “reboot” the show, just as the James Bond, Batman, and Star Trek film franchises have been given new life in recent years. One Internet rumor near the end of season six posited that the show got way off track that year because its best writers were busy working on a 24 feature film when it came time to write new episodes in 2006; they were pulled off the film, which has been in limbo ever since, once season six started to go downhill.)

Even during its first five seasons, 24 quickly adopted the “more is more” strategy of action-movie sequels. Season one centered on an assassination plot during a presidential primary, but subsequent seasons involved the White House and whoever is president on the particular “day” in which the storyline takes place. (The America that 24’s characters live in is a scary-ass place, because in addition to potentially cataclysmic terrorist threats popping up every 18 months or so, there’s also massive corruption in the highest levels of government, and presidents don’t last long in office. In the dozen years, give or take a few, in which 24’s narrative has taken place, there have been seven presidents occupying the highest office in the land, with David Palmer being the only one so far to make it through a full term.) More than halfway through season two, a nuclear bomb was detonated in a remotely populated area in the California desert, but in season six the suitcase nuke Jack questioned Graem about went off in the town of Valencia, 30 miles north of Los Angeles, in just the fourth episode, killing more than 12,000 people.

Scale back, 24, scale back! You’ve been bumping your head on the ceiling of “Wait wait, I can top that” for too long!

The original plan for season seven was a back-to-basics storyline, with Jack fighting genocide in Africa. But budgetary concerns dashed those plans, so a two-hour TV movie called 24: Redemption was made instead, acting as a “bridge” between seasons six and seven and airing last November. “Less is more” is always welcome on 24, but the idea of the white man saving all the helpless black people and therefore saving himself has been done before. Redemption’s plot carried over into season seven, with those terrorists from the fictional African country of “Sangala” attacking the White House because President Taylor was planning to invade the country to stop further genocide.

If, as a viewer, you thought to yourself, “Is this some right-wing comment on Bill Clinton’s inaction in Somalia and Rwanda back in the ’90s?” you were correct (hooray for the right!), except that President Taylor has a Hillary Clinton-like resolve (hooray for the left!). And don’t forget that when the New York City-bound eighth season begins next January, the stem-cell procedure used on Kim to save Jack’s life (hooray for the left!) will most likely end up taking hers (hooray for the right!). Once again, everybody wins — except the fans.

In the final few scenes of 24’s season-seven finale, a dying Jack told FBI agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching) that she should “try to make choices you can live with.” A few minutes later, a Muslim imam Jack had asked to pray with him said, “We live in complex times, where nothing is black and white … Let us forgive ourselves for all the wrongs that we have done.” All of which seems to add up to this: break the law and beat up suspects if that’s what it takes to save the day, but don’t beat yourself up about it at the end of the day.

Fine, I forgive you, 24. But the choices you’ve made the past three seasons aren’t that easy to defend. And since it’s all too easy to pull my eyes away from the screen these days, I can’t really say I’m being forced to endure cruel and unusual punishment — but you are slowly killing your own legacy by staying on the air, which is its own form of viewer torture. Here’s hoping President Obama’s choices will be easier to support, since those will actually affect Americans’ lives in a world that may be free of ticking time bombs but is rarely predictable.