A farewell to Lou Dobbs

So long, take it easy, go fuck yourself.

Regards,
~fang

In case you missed it, the immigrant-bashing, not-sure-where-Obama-was-born coulda-been rocket scientist Mr. Dobbs bailed on his CNN gig at the top of his eponymous show a couple days back. I’m so happy to see him go, I’m including his entire farewell speech below without any snarky embellishments. This way you know you’re getting it straight from the horse’s ass:



My guess is this douschebag is hoping to ride the wave of xenophobia and fear-mongering he was so helpful in whipping up to political office in some backwater hellhole bastion of hard-right crazies. What state does he live in?

Was he fired? I don’t know how to work the Twitter and I don’t listen to PBS so I’m in the dark here. (Although this story from August seems to suggest he may have been shown the door after all.)

I hope he was fired. I glanced at a Hufington Post opinion piece on Dobbs’ abrupt departure from CNN and it brought up a good point. CNN is supposed to be the middle-of-the-road, straight-news outlet. Not left-wing hollering like MSNBC or the vile crud that pukes forth from Fox News. That’s why it runs on the TVs in the terminals in a lot of America’s airports. For years now, CNN had irresponsibly exposed this captive audience to the deranged ravings of a lunatic mind, with a decidedly race-baiting twist.

I’m sure he quit. He’s gonna hitch his wagon to the same group of goofballs who hold ‘tea parties’ and compare Obama to (sigh) Hitler. Fox News would be his most obvious next gig, but over there he’d just be another nut in the Hallelujah Chorus of right-wing looney-tunes. At least on CNN, he was pretty much the lone voice calling out for intolerance, suspicion and hatred of The Other. At Fox, he’d just be one more off-note in an already sour chord.

Frankly, I don’t care what his Grand Scheme is. He’s just not particularly charismatic or compelling, he’s a born middle-of-the-roader; not as loud or crazy as Rush Limbaugh or as crazy sexy as Michele Malkin. He’s just one more angry, aging white guy who’s yanked his platform out from underneath him. I think he’s just taken the first step on his long, unrewarding path to historical footnote.

CNN, this is your chance to reclaim the middle. We need at least one national news network that only aims to report the news, not make it. Do the right thing and don’t look for some other fringe crank racist to replace the one you just lost. Take it as the omen that it is.

American news consumers need an Honest Broker, now more than ever, and shedding yourself of Lou Dobbs is an excellent first step to reclaiming that mantle.

Pan-Generational Geek Nirvana

I have an embarrassing moment every week when I go to the comic book store to buy the latest issues. I’m half-way between 45 and 50 years old. When comics books first started, guys were lucky to live to my age; I don’t think very many of them were still buying comics.

And I don’t know how many are now. Because I live in a small town, the two independent comic stores nearby rarely order everything, and if your requirements aren’t already on file at the shop, you’re likely to miss out on getting your hands on the more obscure books if you’re not on-site when the store opens its doors. Consequently, there’s hardly ever anyone there, young or old, when I do my shopping.

Just one harried clerk, peevishly unpacking UPS boxes while I peer over his shoulder and shuffle through the careful stacks he’s trying to make. Who cares? I already have a friend.

And if there are people there, they’re usually youngsters playing some inexplicable fantasy-related card game together at long, thin tables, the kind the parish used to pull out from storage when they had BINGO in the rec center. I lamented to the counter help the other day that comics used to be a refuge from the stress of human, peer-to-peer interaction and that now the industry seemed to promote it. These card-playing kids seemed almost completely lacking any outward evidence of suffering the ill effects of social stigmatization.

What was the point? They might as well have been playing soccer.

I should put a dollar in a drawer ever time I have to type this: But I digress…

Anyhow, even though I look a little younger than I am, I'm still an old fart buying funny books. That’s how I feel and how these kids must be seeing me. I remember being a kid and seeing older guys in the comic stores and feeling sorry for them.

And I swear, I would have quit by now. I would have! If comics had remained the same as when I was growing up, I would have grown right out of them. I look back at most comics from my childhood now and they seem so quaint. Kind of the way episodes of “All In The Family” look precocious next to “Family Guy.”

Times have changed and comics have kept up with them. They have artists now, and drawing and printing tools now, light years more sophisticated than existed even a decade ago. And the characters have become increasingly three-dimensional, with storylines thought-out and cooked up by guys who must be smoking stuff better than Tommy Chong’s private stash. The two main companies, Marvel and DC, are currently locked in an ever-escalating cycle of “Event” mega-series that tie together every piece-of-shit book in the company to a single over-riding storyline, which inevitably leads into the next storyline. It’s like an unbroken string of multiple, rolling orgasms. The fun never ends.

And of course, most of it is driven by financial imperatives. For instance, as soon as the “Iron Man” movie hit big at the box office, the creative team (writer and artist) on his regular book got bumped up to the A-List. It’s been one of the best reads for months now, and it’s all leading up to the un-death of Captain America in a couple months and the reformation of the Holy Trinity of original Avengers, Thor, Captain America and Iron Man.

And that’s just the comic books. In movie theaters, plans are afoot for another “Iron Man” movie next summer, a Kenneth Branagh-helmed “Thor” film in 2011, a “Captain America: The Original Avenger” flick in 2012 (an election year – that could be really cool!) and then an “Avengers” film the summer after, featuring all the onscreen talent from the individual franchises.

Print may be dead, but as long as film thrives, it looks like the four-color versions will continue to exist if only to keep the characters in the public consciousness during the brief windows between the films’ theatrical and video premieres.

And if Chris Nolan makes another “Batman” film… I kind of hope he doesn’t. I can’t imagine topping “The Dark Knight.” I’d hate to see him soil the franchise by milking it past its expiration date. Marvel, on the other hand, has a plan, and if the films on-deck measure up to “Iron Man” and “Spider-Man” levels of quality and box office success, they’ve got a license to print money for the next five years. Money, and comic books!

But I digress.

As a result of the boom in the industry overall, the dream team-ups I fantasized about in my youth are the bread and butter of today’s four-color funny industry. The one pictured at the top of this post came out this week.

It features 1930s-40s pulp hero Doc Savage and Batman. Now, my dad grew up reading the original Doc Savage pulps, and when they were re-issued in paperback form in the 60s and 70s, he introduced me to them. The paperback covers always featured the buff ‘Man Of Bronze’ in a ripped dress shirt in front of some apocalyptic background, prompting derisive howls of alleged homoeroticism from The Missus to this day:

I just don’t see it.

I keep telling her, “No, if it was Doc’s sexy female cousin Pat Savage in peril and a ripped shirt on the cover, surrounded by a bunch of other shirtless guys, that would be sexy. All these covers say to me is ‘Doc’s a lot tougher than his shirts are,’ and isn’t that something you want in an action hero?”

Anyhow, the comic pictured at top – which could have been complete shit and I would have bought it anyhow – turned out to be great! It mixes and matches elements from Doc’s 30s/40s milieu, like the dirigibles in the sky and the auto-gyro on the cover, with more recent tropes like delivering exposition through the use of TV broadcasts. But by not dwelling on the melding of the disparate eras, they get away with it and the new world comes alive, thanks in no small part to the art of Phill Noto, who somehow marries the Art Deco glamour of Doc Savage’s New York with the film noir nihilism of Batman’s Gotham. It’s frankly a brilliant effort.

Now, Doc has been rendered in comic book form before:

...at least one time I can recall in the mid-70s to coincide with the release of a supremely lame movie version at the same time:

But regrettably, the comics were pretty standard-issue stuff at the time. No effort was expended to keep the flavor of the character from the original pulps intact and the whole sorry enterprise was gratefully short-lived and completely forgettable.

[A word of disclaimer: I’ve come across some of the aging 1960s Bantam reprints of the original pulps and the writing is laugh-out-loud bad. Conan should have William Shatner do dramatic readings of them on “The Tonight Show.” I don’t even know how to write a properly constructed sentence myself, but I can spot a howler when I see one. If you want a good laugh, go to powells.com and order yourself up a “Doc Savage” paperback or two.]

But if you want a crackling adventure yarn, well-written and beautifully illustrated (by Brian Azzarello and Phil Noto, respectively) featuring a young Batman still learning the ropes and The Man Of Bronze at the peak of his Man-Of-Broniziest, race down to your local comic book joint today. I haven’t enjoyed such a pleasant four-color surprise in quite a long time.

Longer than some of you young punks playing card games have been alive. Now get off my lawn before I call the police!!

Why it’s more fun to be me than to be around me [example 346.02]

(And let me assure you, it’s no day at the beach being me, either.)

Sometimes it’s the little things in life…

So we’re having an election tomorrow. No big deal, no celebrity politicians on the bill, mostly measures and propositions and other stuff that turns the paying-attention part of my brain to the “Off” position.

I’m driving through town this afternoon to pick The Boy up at daycare and one of the propositions has sign-bearers on literally every street corner. “No on P!” their giant signs exhort in big red block letters as their bearers attempt to engage passersby.

I didn’t bother to acquaint myself with the details but assume it deals with some NIMBY-type issue – a perhaps well-meaning idea that everybody thinks is great in theory but damned well doesn’t want in their own neighborhood.

I pull up to a curved-off right turn at a busy 4-way intersection. Red light. While I’m waiting for a break in traffic, the protest lady on the corner is waving her big “No on P!” sign and trying to catch my eye.

Since there’s no way to convincingly pretend I don’t see her, I roll down the passenger-side window, lean over, and with a perfectly innocent countenance ask — after a brief pause to make sure I have her undivided attention — “Where do you stand on poo?”

Some days, there is just nothing finer than a little well-placed potty-training humor.

It is accomplished!

I’ve been working for more than ten years on my first long-form piece of narrative fiction and I just finished it yesterday. Worked on it all morning (mostly on formatting issues), took a break to go to the dentist for yet more compulsory dental calisthenics, then came home and worked till I dropped. By the time I dropped, it was finished.

At least finished enough for me to retire it and think about doing something else with my scant free time. Like learning to play the guitar more good, or speak passable English. Maybe get to know my family...

I’m sure some grammatical, punctuation and formatting mistakes remain but my feeling right now is “fuck them.” It’s all there, just the way I want it, and if somebody wants to edit it into perfection someday, they have my blessing.

Although it took me ten+ years to complete, in the interim I also finished a 3-hour Captain America screenplay and a 16-hour miniseries about the second half of the XVIII Dynasty of ancient Egypt.

But this is the real deal – the thinly-veiled autobiography that most first-time authors start with. Strictly for the purposes of satisfying my own vanity, I will present the prologue below in its entirety then never mention the subject again.

Finally, I’d like to thank Tucson, Arizona, for scarring me so completely and effectively as a child growing up there that I spent more than ten years trying to write my contempt for it out of my system.

And now, the Prologue:

The sun had slipped almost completely behind the Judean mountains to the west, and most of the crowd had gone home. Crucifixions, even of local celebrities, had begun to lose their drawing power by the time the Romans and the city elders sentenced the carpenter-rabbi from Nazareth to hang from a cross.

The Roman crucifixion was not a meticulous affair. Like the Romans themselves, it offered just enough rote and ritual to appear a legitimate bureaucratic function, while its application was often as not sloppy and open to wide-ranging interpretation.

Crucifixion offered its victims a generous array of ways to die, and different victims succumbed to different causes. Blood loss. Internal bleeding. Head trauma. Suffocation. If one withstood everything else, the suffocation took them.

No one walked away from a Roman crucifixion.

That day there were three unfortunates lined up along the crest of the hill overlooking the drab Judean countryside. A light drizzle had begun to fall, and storm clouds were boiling up out of the west. All three condemned hung with their heads down in the thin rain, their long matted hair hugging their purpled, bloody faces. The heads of crude iron nails extruded from their wrists and feet, and all three were fighting for every remaining breath.

The heartiest of the trio croaked out through cracked lips to the man hanging at his side, “I’m Demas. That’s me mate Gestas on the other end. He’s the troublemaker.”

Gestas glanced over but said nothing. It didn’t seem he could spare the effort.

Demas continued, “An honest man can’t earn a living wage, then when he’s forced to nick from the temple granary to feed his family… this is the end of it.”

The stranger in the middle either didn’t hear or was too weak from blood-loss to muster a response.

“Gestas, tell our new mate what they got you for.”

This opportunity proved worth the effort. Gestas spat out, as best he could through swollen lips and missing teeth, “For being a Jew, trying to live peaceably in his own homeland.”

One of the guards noticed that, and with a half-hearted scowl, thrust his spear in and out of Gestas’ shriveled belly.

Gestas screamed in pain but seemed to smile at the same time, as if reveling in this validation of his hatred for his tormentors.

The guard wandered the couple steps back to his post and grumbled to his companion about the rain. He struggled to pull his cowl up over his helmet while his companion laughed at his clumsiness.

Demas turned to the second man.

“Hey. Hey…”

The man in the middle crooked his head slightly toward his inquisitor, but said nothing.

Demas persisted, “What did they get you for?”

The man in the middle seemed to slip even further down on his painful perch. With an effort, he flung his wet mop of hair onto his shoulder, revealing a face so badly beaten that it made Gestas’ wounds look superficial by comparison. He opened his near-toothless mouth to show where the top of his tongue had recently been either chopped or chewed off. His eye that remained, however swollen over it was, was clear and held no self-pity.

In spite of himself, Demas looked away.

After a while of grim silence, Demas turned back to the man and said, “You must be that preacher I heard about. That healer. The vandal. The heretic. You had to have known this would be where you’d wind up, didn’t you?”

The man ignored him this time and concentrated instead on the effort of drawing his next breath.

Demas glanced over at the guards again, then continued in a lower voice, “How come you don’t miracle yourself away off this son of a bitch? And take me with you.” Demas glanced over at Gestas, then back at the man hanging next to him. “The two of us, you and me – we could still make it!”

The man looked over at Demas, searching his face to see if he was being mocked.

Demas averted his eyes and stammered, “I used to watch you preach, whenever I could.” He paused, before deciding to continue. “I saw you cure a cripple once, right there in front of my eyes, a mate of mine the whole of my life. After that, I, uh… guess I followed you at a distance, you know. My career was um, at odds with some of your, uh, ideals – but I never got tired of hearing you speak. I always felt… good listening to you talk.”

The second man stared at him a moment longer, then his head sagged forward.

The rain drizzled on a while longer uninterrupted before Demas mumbled to himself, “Sure wish I could hear you talk now…”

Some thought the carpenter would use his uncanny abilities to rescue himself at the end, but for reasons that were lost with him, he never did.

In the end, he died like any man. Alone. Afraid.

I stood at the foot of the center cross in the drizzling rain, as close as the disinterested guards would allow an ussauming young Jewish boy to approach. Only one other remained in the rain and mud at the foot of Golgotha with me; by any honest account, the man who should have been hanging on that center cross, the criminal Barabbas.

Or Barabbas the patriot – depending upon whom you asked.

The rain, mud-red with the dying man’s blood, ran in rivulets down the sodden earth. I had to step aside to get out of the way. My feet weren’t fit to be washed in it.

Memo to Daddy:

“Oh, I see you’re standing better today”

As usual, there is a silver lining of comedy to be found in even the gloomiest stormcloud of misfortune…

So of course by this morning the sutures in my gum are coming loose prematurely and I have to race back to the dentist to get them repaired at a moment’s notice. I hop in the car and haul ass out there and sure enough, the anticipated quickie last-minute patch job ends up requiring multiple applications of The Long Needle. And I was so sure it was going to be a painless affair I totally failed to drug myself up beforehand.

After the repeated stabbings, the actual re-stitching only took about 10 minutes. As I was stepping out of the chair the dental assistant, the same girl who’d been involved in last week’s ordeal, remarked, “Oh, I see you’re standing better today.” Although I have no recollection, they must have had to use a spatula to scoop me out of that chair last Friday.

I am so grateful I have no recollection, I only regret leaving credible witnesses alive. I must have been having a prescient moment when I walked into the office today and told the girl at the desk, “Hi, I seem to have misplaced my dignity and was wondering if I might have left it here last week...”

Dr. Teeth and the electric mayhem acid test

Let me take a minute to talk about my teeth.

Now, if I was talking about the current state of my teeth, it would qualify as a short story at best. There’s just not very much left to tell. If I was telling the history of them, however, it would have to be published in volumes, like textbooks about the 100-year War.

Let’s just skip to the present-day and I’ll fill in any gaps that come up (no dental pun intended).

A month ago the latest crown dropped out of my mouth. This has been happening to me for more than 20 years and I didn’t think that much about it. When I was in my 20s I was a major meth-head and as a result, have had terrible dental karma ever since. Even while in my 20s, the few times I visited a dentist it was always a credit dentist in the ghetto and my business partner and I would tailgate the dental appointment. We’d arrive early and sit in the car in the parking lot slamming beers, smoking joints and doing rails. None of the dentists spoke English and the place was a warehouse, with sheets between dental chairs instead of walls. One time I got caught adjusting the ratio of laughing gas to oxygen, I remember getting cursed out in Korean by a guy named Kong but was pronounced ‘Kang.’ Or vice versa.

In my defense, there was a lot going on at the time.

So when the latest crown gave up the ghost I sighed but didn’t give it much thought. Having a crown re-attached is like filling up my gas tank to me: Oh geez, is it that time again already?

Brevity, brevity. I still have TV I want to watch tonight.

So anyhow, I quit doing speed 20 or 21 years ago and quit abusing prescription drugs about 10 years after that.

Till today.

When I went to the dentist a couple weeks ago to get my crown reattached, as usual, I encountered a worst-case scenario. I’m embarrassed that I was even surprised.

The dentist, a lovely young lady whom we shall call Dr. Teeth, informed me that there was not enough tooth left to attach anything to. We were going to have to have put in a post. You know, drill a metal stick onto my jawbone and glue a fake tooth to it. Except, because I had already had the tooth root-canaled, first she was going to have to remove the root canal, which of course was installed with the intention of being permanent.

And then we had to wait three to six months for the procedure to heal before I had to go back and she could drill the metal spike into my head. Jesus Christ!

As the date of my appointment approached, I became more and more frightened of the excavation that was going to be required.

Oh wait, let me skip ahead to something irrelevant but fascinating and gross. I heard The Missus on the phone tonight, telling someone that Dr. Teeth (the dentist, remember?) had told her that she had filled the huge hole she scraped in my mouth with bone matter from corpses and cows. I don’t have anything to add at this moment. As you may imagine, I’m still processing that piece of information.

Getting back to this morning’s ordeal, The Missus had already agreed to drive me so I could get as gakked beforehand as my relative sobriety would allow me. I took my full day’s allotment of anti-stress meds for breakfast and before I left the house, I also took the two valium left over from my last oral surgery as well as a couple of OTC sleeping pills. My dentist doesn’t use gas – usually a deal-breaker for me – but she’s so damned good.

To give you an example of my dental karma, I was originally sent to Dr. Teeth after another local dentist had performed a botched root canal on me. So we met when she had to re-root-canal a tooth that had already just endured a horrific trauma. I swear to god, I wouldn’t be surprised if I go home to glory some day straight from the dentist’s chair.

So I was pretty loaded by the time we arrived for my latest punishment. And then I mentioned that I should have called ahead and had her prescribe me a couple of valium for this morning’s procedure. She was surprised that I hadn’t and asked me if I’d like one. I asked for two. She said, “Well, you’re supposed to take them an hour before you come.” I told her not to worry, I’d chew them.

The drugs arrived and I chewed ‘em right up, washing them down with some tepid tap water. She scrunched her face and asked me if it tasted okay. I shrugged and said it tasted like chicken.

Then she hit me with the big needles and I tell you what, I may have been relaxed, but those shots still hurt like a mothfucker. I don’t know if it was new drugs or new places she was poking me, but the pain radiated from the injection point down the inside of my mouth like a thick, burning trickle of lava. But hell, I knew better than to complain. If the shots did their job, it should be the last actual pain I felt.

All that was left was the fear.

Then she gave me my regularly scheduled teeth cleaning while we waited for the shots to take effect. When it came time to get down to brass tacks, she asked me if my mouth felt numb. I was so blasted out of my mind on stress-relieving agents by that time my speech actually slurred. It was embarrassing but I think I convinced her it was the novacaine.

Here’s where I cut to the chase: She ended up having to postpone then cancel her next appointment because my one-hour procedure ended up taking two and a half hours. Of digging and scraping and drilling and more digging and scraping and drilling. And she still didn’t get 100% of the tooth out. She told me there’s a tiny bit of tooth left that is so deep she couldn’t risk further excavation. Presumably, she was at risk of drilling all the way through my bone and out of the bottom of my chin. And that there’s a ‘tiny’ chance it could cause me problems down the road. Which would require a repeat of today’s horrific ordeal except next time I would make damn sure I was unconscious for it.

The saving grace, if there was one, was that I was so twisted on the dope that the whole thing passed for me in a timeless state of constant fear and noise and pressure and discomfort and more fear. If I had to guess, I woulda guessed 90 minutes at best.

Two and half hours of digging and scraping into my skeletal structure, then filling it with the remains of dead cows and people.

The weird thing about that kind of experience is, no matter how badly you try to overdose yourself before the procedure, by the time it’s over and you’re out of that chair your body has dumped so much adrenaline into your system… I would compare it to how fast you sober up when the police car behind you hits his lights and siren. I actually walked out there surprisingly conscious and coherent. And to Dr. Teeth’s credit, as usual, the only pain I feel now that all the drugs have worn off are the poke-points of the needles, which is literally unavoidable.

Still, I have to go back in a week and have the sutures removed and two fillings replaced at the baseline of couple of my front teeth. Last time I went in to have one of those little fillings patched up, I ended up with a surprise root canal. That was just a couple months ago. What do you suppose the odds are with two bum fillings I’ll walk out of there with simple replacements? And my front teeth are extremely sensitive to pain. I always have to have to have her inject me again and again during the procedure. Last time it was so bad, she had to inject the painkiller directly into my jawbone.

It promises to be a lovely time. I can tell you right now that Dr. Teeth will not get out of the office at 1PM the way her receptionist explained to me she had to next Friday. She said that to me so as a joke I said, “Well then, how about noon?” expecting a laugh. Instead she wrote it down and handed me an appointment card.

Does this story have a point? Fuck no. If I had to have a point to every story I wrote, I’d expect to be paid for it. And I don’t see anyone lining up to pay me for writing.

I’ll be sure to drop you a line after next week’s alleged quick in-and-out office visit. A good time – and karma – is guaranteed for none.