May 07, 2003
HOW CAN WE MISS YOU IF YOU WON'T GO AWAY?
I've heard a lot of passionate - and well-reasoned, I might add - discourse the past two months about the war, the war on terror, the Iraq invasion and George W. Bush's leadership of the country. And then there are the ramblings of jerkwads like these.
All of which makes me grateful for the recent spate of rants I've heard coming out of Dennis Miller the past few weeks, both on his special and his Tonight Show appearances.
Last night was a classic. Miller took on everyone from the French to Baghdad Bob.
My favorite was his slam on Clinton over his slam on Bush while his own country was fighting a war.
Miller's line: "Bill Clinton, if you were any more low rent, you'd be a spring break destination."
Other great lines he's said lately:
“You’d better gas up the dinghy and go fishing with Fredo, because you are dead to me."
“If you’re at a peace march, and the guy next to you has a sign saying ‘Bush is Hitler,’ stop the peace stuff for a second and beat his ass.”
“Sean Penn, for instance, is urging restraint. What could we possibly say to Sean to get him on board? If only Saddam Hussein was a paparazzi.”
“The French are always reticent to surrender to the wishes of their friends and always more than willing to surrender to the wishes of their enemies.”
“Clinton’s the sort of guy who’ll always volunteer to help you move, then when you’ve got four of ya picking up the sofa, he’s the one who’ll fake lifting.”
And this one directed at Bush: “If you’re watching, I think you’re doing a hell of a job. I’m proud you’re my president. …I think there are a lot more people out here on your side than you may think.”
Still, there are a lot of people who are bothered by what they see as Miller pandering to conservatives. Barry Crimmins, a Boston standup who never quite got the name recognition nationally that he deserved, has this take on his former boss' lean to the right.
Miller also wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that ran yesterday that was bullseye on-target:
"WHY ARE WE IN IRAQ?"
By DENNIS MILLER
"With their dominance in sport, at work and at home eroded, Bush thought white American men needed to know they were still good at something. That's where Iraq came in . . .
The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half-gone in baseball . . . On the other hand, the good white American male still had the Armed Forces . . . ."
Norman Mailer, writing in the London Times' op-ed page last week.
***
When The Wall Street Journal asked me to react to Mr. Mailer's latest daft screed, I almost took a pass. I've never written an opinion piece for a newspaper before, and furthermore I know as much about Norman Mailer as I do about Mary Quant. I think they were both kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s.
Other than a vague recollection that Mr. Mailer once played Boswell to Jack Henry Abbott's Samuel Johnson, I really only remember one other pertinent fact about him. But, what the heck, if you're going to take a stab at something new, why not take a stab at it with Norman Mailer.
***
Mr. Mailer was the Father of the Non-Fiction Novel and now he can also claim lineage as the distant, addled third-cousin of the Rational Op-Ed. Studying at the Sorbonne as a young man obviously made a deep impression on him because this thing reads like Jacques Chirac's Dream Journal.
With six marriages under his belt, one would assume Mr. Mailer has a stranglehold on warfare. One would be wrong.
His basic contention is that we went to war with Iraq because with the dominance of white American men in the boxing ring, the office and the home front eroded, George W. Bush thought they needed to know they were still good at something. Mr. Mailer has a degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Harvard so he had to know that argument wouldn't fly. But, then again, maybe this claptrap is just a grand put-on. The fact that I and many others can't differentiate anymore does not auger well for Norm's legend.
You know something, the only "race" that really occurred to me during the war was our Army's sprint to Baghdad. Conversely, Mr. Mailer appears to see just race in our armed forces, right down to the "Super-Marines" as he calls them. It seems that Mr. Mailer even notices color in people when they're wearing camouflage. He then goes on to speak about racial subsets in the world of sports. Now, when I watch baseball, football and basketball, I see uniforms and skills. Mr. Mailer evidently sees races and nationalities. He's like a Casey Stengel/William Shockley hybrid. "Why'd you send the rook' back to Triple A, Skip?" "Well, he was gettin' around on the fast ball but he still couldn't hit the bell curve."
Ironically, Mr. Mailer seems to see everything in the world in terms of black and white, except of course, good and evil.
He also fancies himself a boxer, a "champeen," but stuff like this will just sully his record. He's now a club fighter, a pug, a tomato can that Warhol no doubt gave him. He constantly uses boxing metaphors and yet refuses to give President Sugar Ray Bush any credit for his startling TWKO (Three-Week Knock Out).
A guy like Mailer hates a guy like Bush because Mailer thinks of himself as infinitely smarter than Bush and yet President Bush is the most powerful man on the planet and old Normy's connecting through Atlanta and flying on prop planes to a community college that's so far out in the sticks the mail rider has yet to arrive with the message that The Great Mailer is currently more out of the loupe than a jeweler with conjunctivitis. All so he can scoop up a sub-microscopic honorarium and the accolades of star-struck locals and 18-year-olds who mistakenly think Mr. Mailer wrote "Gravity's Rainbow."
He feels there's no connection between the secular state of Iraq and radical fundamentalist terrorists. Not true. Abu Abbas was recently recaptured there after Europe practiced catch-and-release with him many years back. Abu Nidal was found shot to death last year in his Baghdad apartment. Police suspect fair play.
And while I don't want to appear to pick more nits than a father-and-son Spider Monkey team who know they're being followed by a National Geographic film crew, Mr. Mailer's wrong when he says that only one-half of our country was for the war: 70% is one-half only if the whole is considered to be 140%.
Mr. Mailer at one time challenged and provoked. Now he just provokes. Norman Mailer has become Norman Maine, a former matinee idol whom loved ones best keep an eye on, because if this is the best he can now muster, he'll no doubt be walking purposely into the surf off Provincetown any day now. And as Mr. Mailer's prostate gradually supplants his ego as the largest gland in his body, he's going to have to realize, as is the case with all young lions who inevitably morph into Bert Lahr, that his alleged profundities are now being perceived as the early predictors of dementia.
***
I empathize with Mr. Mailer in one regard, though. Although he's clearly abdicated the lucid throne, it must be hellish for someone who can still arrange words so beautifully -- i.e. "the question will keen in pitch . . ." -- to wake up every morning and have it slowly dawn on him that he's effectively been rendered totally irrelevant.
Mr. Miller is a comedian.