Addams Family DSMV

would it be too too heretical
to argue that the 99th remake
of Superman or Batman
has at least as much artistic legitimacy
as a 99th remake of Hamlet?

because the icons of popular culture
resonate necessarily in new ways
as pop culture evolves

and remakes offer a perfect canvas
for deconstructing or rethinking
those icons and their evolution




take the addams family

when the cartoons were adapted
from Ross's prudish New Yorker
to network children's teevee

they lost all hint of menace
so it all became a pose
they'd never really hurt a fly

where the originals had a strain
of corpses-in-the-basement
more suitable to texas chainsaw masochists

but the remake i'd like to see
would follow more the lines
of twin peaks' dale cooper
investigating the black lodge

sociopaths with social standing
sacrificing cheerleaders by the moon

and it could be useful to explore
parallels to the current crop
of political sociopaths

richard perle as gomez
echoing leland palmer's psychotic songs-and-dances

ann coulter as morticia
loosing the dogs of war on the inferior races

dick cheney as fester
you really don't want to know
what he's up to in the basement

barbara bush as grandma
brewing potions in the rose garden

W (or rush limbaugh?) as pugsley
playing frog baseball with beavis and butthead

and i'm seeing wednesday
as a suicidal teen
a cutter (think fiona apple?)
whose redemption
could be the main storymover

and there's a little-noticed
psychological twist
in the observation that
among these sociopaths
uncle fester is unique in retaining
a slightly conflicted conscience

you can see it in his face

a distant memory
that all this is somehow wrong

so agent cooper (eg)
might at least
talk him into untying his bound hands...

yinYang

more and more often
these days
i hear a particular
bell
going off in my head

as the Neocon West
and the
feudal?
East
send increasingly
precise
echoes
of each other's
narcissism

(stolen elections
disappearings
enforced religion)

which ought to be a
yin yang instantiation

but that they're both black
and getting blacker

and if i ask
which side willed this?

it seems neither did

W is a puppet
ObL is a puppetphobe
the war on terror a puppet show
to distract us as
our pockets are picked
our values cheapened

The president's concubines

the rightwing spin machine
has only itself to blame
for the rise of the blogosphere

because when every public gesture
is made inauthentically
the public will seek authenticity elsewhere

but even so
i've learned to withhold full trust
even from the blogosphere

because the snares of Satan-Rove are subtile

so I take with a grain of salt
Capitol Hill Blues' highly plausible rumors
of W's impending nervous breakdown

or this from Drudge
that he's retreated behind a harem of four forgiving women
his wife, his mother, Condi and Karen Hughes

but the image this suggests is dramatic

W trying to be a Norman Rockwell hero
in easychair, with pipe

four concubines at his feet

while in the dark closet shadows lurk
the greedy evil connivers

and perhaps beyond
glancing worriedly in the windows
Powell and Clinton and GHW
(how far we've fallen
that GHW looks like a ray of hope)




add, too, Nora Ephron's theory
that W exercises to keep depression at bay
in the form of an exercise bike
that he keeps close by
belying the pretense of calm

and remark the absence
of his less-forgiving daughters
who must have taken an ever-increasing burden of crap
from their peers over the last few years

George and Harriet

the explanation, i think
of the harriet miers nomination

can only be that w has
stopped listening to his advisers

they surely didn't recommend harriet

he's retreated so far
she's the only one he feels safe with

(and they surely tried to get him
to rehearse the nola hammering
but he refused
unwilling to admit
even to them
it was his first time)




to qualify for facetime with w
you now have to suspend disbelief so perfectly
that he senses no hint of
threatening reality

he craves oblivion

no criticism, ever




and if rove goes

(and when miers goes)

who's going to step into that power vacuum?

Therapy for the Evil One

As a lefty, I hate having to add to my list of heroes, who really might really have helped Nola cope, both the military and the (pre-W) Halliburton/KBR. The day after a hurricane obviously isn't the time for environmental impact studies or self-esteem workshops, and we lefties need to forge a longterm consensus on this, sturdy enough to repel Rush&Rove-style attacks.

But where were the military and KBR when the levee broke? How did the neocons' greatest supposed strength prove their worst Achilles heel?

For some reason, the puppeteers whispering in W's earpiece didn't have a clue how to deal with a real logistic emergency, and didn't even have the sense to stand aside and let a grownup to take the wheel. Is it possible that none of them was glued to the live tv-news coverage-- has this administration deluded themselves into believing they're above the news, that reality is something they can arbitrarily create?

Their past experience had surely given them every reason to expect they could feed the newspeople a restricted diet of lies, and that the newspeople would bob their heads and gobble it down. And if there had been even a one-block physical distance between the reporters and the hurricane victims, this spinning probably would have worked. (In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the neocons recognise this, and look for ways to keep reporters penned up next time.)

W's incompetence has given birth to a White House culture where your title automatically means that others praise your performance, at least in public. The left needs to compile a reel of bureaucrats praising each other's responsiveness, as the live feed is showing hundreds dying.

My title for this post is inspired by Cheney, I think it was, saying that liberals after 9-11 wanted to give al Qaeda therapy... which has that perfect 1% level of truth allowing rightwing talkers to run away with it.

Therapy for Nola's ecology wasn't the prescription the day after the hurricane, but it was the prescription for the decade before. We need to learn to spinframe this.