The woman who said “I don’t pay taxes; the little people do” may have inadvertently undercut the level of seriousness that some people will give to the looming prospect of a theoretically higher tax rate for the one percenters in return for giving them a chance to see how people addicted to consumerism handle austerity. A thirty-nine percent tax rate that won’t be paid does sound more devastating than an irrelevant thirty-five percent tax rate, doesn’t it?
Wasn’t it established that Mitt Romney only pays about 15% in income tax? If so, how serious of a threat would it be to tell him that if the USA goes off the financial cliff the theoretical rate he should be paying will be increased and life will get grim for the people who get government benefits. Didn’t he dub them the 47 percenters?
Wealthy folks (like Mitt), after the first of the year, will be able to turn on the evening news, tune in to the nightly images of misery and drop out of the ranks of caring Christians. Those with cash register hearts will see going off the financial cliff as the starting gun for a race to exploit the rest of society in a time of hardship and suffering. Wasn’t there a Country song about chilling beers by holding it next to a cad’s heart? Did he get a job as a CBS TV reporter?
Looking forward to an apocalyptic event that coincided with the end of the Mayan calendar because it would provide excellent material for use in a column may have been just a tad immature and illogical and now that it hasn’t happened writing about how CBS Evening News has morphed from a televised version of the World News Roundup into a contest to see which reporter can be the first to get an interviewee to cry on camera seems a bit anticlimactic and mundane. If you had a buck for every time a person cried on camera this week and next on the Evening News, would you have a fistful of dollars or not?
After walking away unscathed from a rendezvous with certain death, it seems concomitant upon this columnist to inject a high level of joie d’vivre into our attempts to ridicule the arena of politics and perhaps in an year when not even Congressional representatives have to face the rigors of reelection to just focus on the other aspects of contemporary pop culture that are fun to observe.
Isn’t the yell that Wile E. Coyote gives when he goes sailing into the void a trademarked item that can’t be used without getting permission from a movie studio’s legal department?
When the fiscal cliff chapter of the political history of the USA started to unfold, didn’t Nancy Pelosi reassured Americans that she would bring up a measure in the House that had passed in the Senate last summer and thus avert a crisis? Did she forget her solution to the problem? Do the mainstream media journalists consider it rude to remind her of her promise?
How many skeptical commentators asked about how many Trevon Martin type incidents would occur in the schools if armed people are put in every school? Is it realistic to expect that the armed guards will provide the law enforcement example of baseball’s unassisted triple play with a Rambo reaction to a school shooter?
If Fox News reported that its viewers were exceptionally well informed and that the concept of “the dumbing down of America” was part of a bogus Liberal conspiracy theory, and their viewers believed them; would that be an example of the Epimenides paradox? Why is it that every time we hear the expression “I saw it on Fox News,” we think of the title of Ross Thomas’ mystery novel “The Fools in Town are on our side”?
Traditionally Ann Coulter used to use crazy talk to divert attention away from George W. Bush when the liberal criticism of him was getting intense. Apparently the Republicans asked Wayne Lapierre to substitute for her recently when they wanted to turn a discussion on gun control into ideological gridlock.
When we heard of the investigation into the incident on TV that involved David Gregory holding up an extra capacity ammo clip, we were reminded of the time back in the Sixties when a New York City local news anchorman (Jeraldo Rivera?) was arrested on camera by someone dressed like a NYPD cop for holding up a roach (ie a marijuana cigarette) while he was on the air. Who was that journalist? What happened to that case? Maybe if that on air personality is still serving time for that stunt, he can truly report that (for him) the Sixties still have consequences and aren’t over yet.
On one episode of the popular Sixties TV series Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise was told that when the 21st century arrived massive land wars would be obsolete and that wars would be limited local struggles called Bush Wars. Is that sound byte on Youtube? If so we could write a column about that sometime during 2013.
If the World’s Laziest Journalist is going to relegate politics in the USA to the back burner, we could concentrate on other topics. We might even shift our tendency to post on early Friday morning (PST in the USA) to a different day and time. Maybe that would permit more readers an opportunity to skim our offerings?
Some cynics might suspect that a shift in emphasis away from politics to more of the “let the good times roll” reports might just be an excuse for this columnist to make the task of writing the columns more like an excuse to go out and have fun. Watching a lava lamp and being inspired to write heavy philosophical think pieces might have been appropriate before the arrival of the last day on the Mayan Calendar, but now that we have cheated death isn’t every sandwich going to be a treat? Didn’t a famous musician, after he learned he had a very serious health problem, advise people to “enjoy every sandwich!”?
Perhaps we should write a column about the old movie serials where a Hero (such as The Shadow as played by Victor Jory in the 1940 serial series) shrugs off a brush with certain death and plunges ahead with life in next week’s installment. Will the saga of the post economic cliff America be a similar story line?
If a person rolls his car and winds up lying on a remote highway with a bunch of broken bones there are two ways to react. One can either say: “Oh dear, this means a long stay in the hospital” or he can exuberantly exclaim: “I’m still alive!” We think that T-shirts that say “I survived the Mayan Apocalypse!” might sell well. With or without an augmentation to the bank account, this columnist thinks that all the members of the Mayan Apocalypse Survivors Association should make a concerted effort to make 2013 an enjoyable experience.
Yes, we realize that the suspension of unemployment checks is a serious economic situation, but if people who encounter that problem overcome the challenge just think of how baffled and aggravated the rich people, who expected to see soap opera existential crises every night on the evening news, will be. It will be just like in the movie serials. When 2012 ended it looked like “curtains” for sure, but when 2013 begins the financial cliff (except on Fox) will be No Big Thing (NBT).
If, somehow, the unemployed workers, manage to adopt a Zen existence that isn’t dependent on a weekly paycheck, just think how incensed that will make the capitalists who are counting on seeing the victims of their strategy suffer extensively. It would almost be as if the victims refused to suffer just out of spite.
Back in the Eighties there was a spate of self help books that advised people to cut back on their standard of living and retire at a young age. Perhaps some of the people getting their last unemployment check next week, should buy some used copies of those books this week?
After a few moments of contemplating what would make a good topic for a more feature oriented column, we realized that it might require a great deal of fact finding to produce a good trend-spotting column. On the other hand, the obvious absurdities in politics are so readily available and the mainstream media makes no effort to point them out and so such columns full of “these columns practically write themselves” material need very little effort to produce, so maybe we will just slowly transition into some of the alternative topics.
Do the places that sell marijuana for medicinal purposes make extra profits by selling such periphery items as lava lamps? Are T-shirts featuring a famous rolling paper logo still being sold? Do the pot clubs sell those rolling papers? Do rock concerts still include light shows? When is the Jefferson Airplane going to release a new album?
Was it George Carlin who first said: “If you can remember the Sixties; you weren’t really there.”? Shouldn’t the closing quote for this column be something more intellectual such as Nietsche’s quote: “ . . . when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” (We preferred to use the Wile C. Coyote howl of despair, but, alas, it was not to be.)
Now the disk jockey will play “Rescue me,” “Cry me a river,” and “Sea of heartbreak.” We have to go find a good VHS tape to play on New Year’s Eve. Have a “ . . . but what if an armed guard had been there” type week.
Now what?
Slightly after four p.m. on the day we published the column criticizing CBS for tarnishing their legacy that was established by Edward R. Murrow, we heard Norm Goldman criticize, on his radio broadcast, a brand of banks (think of a 1939 movie that was a career breakthrough for John Wayne) because a recent decision by the Ninth Superior Court seemed to legitimize some unscrupulous accounting practices that always favored the bank and screwed the public.
While preparing to write a new column, we suddenly remembered the old oriental parable that ends with the punch line: “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet (those damn drones at it again?).” Voila! We had a Sutter’s Mill Moment. An epiphany, as it were.
We didn’t need to envy CBS their ability to send a reporter and (union) camera crew out to video a person who was having tough times during post financial cliff period of uncertainty, if we wanted to get a video that would go viral on the Internets, we needed to get a video of a bank official who, wracked by guilt, was crying while contemplating the damage he had wrought.
Then what?
Everybody would see it.
Then what?
One thing seems certain. If we get a video of a banker crying because of his complicity in a business practice that destroys hundreds of lives, CBS Evening News sure as hell ain’t gonna do a feature about how the World’s Laziest Journalist made a video that went viral on the Internets. Dang! It’s a tad late in the game to start searching for a new career . . . but . . . it will be a new year soon. It will be a new year in some places when this column is posted.
Whatever happened to the guy who was America’s oldest porn actor? Did he retire? Could we do some Gonzo style reporting about walking a mile in his moccasins?
Speaking of the cinema, since we do love movies and since a goodly number of young folks like the movies made by Quentin Tarantino and since he has a new film just out, perhaps we could go see it and write a review as a way to rekindle our career as a film reviewer. (Google Richard Ebert’s review of “Van Wilder” and read the last two paragraphs.)
Perhaps since we are not fully versed on the Facebook fad, we can just designate everything the World’s Laziest Journalist posts as “open to the public” and give George Taki (of Stark Trek fame) a run for the title of the most popular guy on that website.
We have heard of one woman in L. A. who went to a director to ask for a loan and was told: “Write a sentence on this sheet of paper.” She was totally perplexed but did as she was asked. He threw the results in a drawer and jumped on the intercom and instructed his secretary to draw up a standard amount check for buying the film rights (to that sentence). There are people in Hollywood who make a decent living just by selling ideas (known as “a pitch”) for films.
Didn’t one of those specialists become a director with offices on Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica? Hmmm. If he is busy maybe we could track him down and start a new career in pitching and sell him an idea for a new film?
Hey, bro, do you want to buy the story (with a few more specific details supplied) of a nurse who successfully escaped from a POW camp? Yeah, yeah, yeah we know about the guy who used a motorcycle to escape from a POW camp in WWII but this is another “based on a true story” adventure with a chick as the protagonist. What actress could turn down a chance to walk a mile in Steve McQueen’s moccasins?
Our columns rarely get comments but isn’t the topic of which young actress could evoke favorable comparisons to Steve McQueen rich with the potential for astute suggestions?
On the same program that he castigated bankers, Norm Goldman proceeded to tackle the legalize pot issue. Back in the Seventies there was a novel, titled “Acapulco Gold,” that hypostasized what American culture would be like when (not “if”) marijuana became legal.
Wouldn’t it be odd if Washington’s repressive attitude forced the NRA and the legalize pot advocates to agree to a mutual assistance/defense treaty and seek refuge as a coalition group in a third part such as the Pirate Party?
Maybe after the bankers repent and ask forgiveness and the gun control issue is settled once and for all, maybe then the lobbyists representing America’s pharmaceutical companies will permit the politicians to address the legalize pot issue but in Thirteen the chances for that happening fall below the “slim and none” level down to the Australian category labeled “not bloody well likely, mate!”
In our efforts to select a photo to accompany this column, we remembered an image we acquired while doing some fact checking for a possible trend spotting story about snapshot collecting. It showed a woman on a ship and carried the cryptic caption “Spring 1942.” In the Spring of that year, the world was in turmoil but someone was making an effort to improve their lot in life. Aren’t all journeys manifestations of optimism? Couldn’t that woman be a metaphor for the USA at the start of 2013?
Maybe in an effort to achieve “fair and balanced” news coverage, CBS will hire a pundit to criticize the efforts of mainstream media in the USA? They could feature a televised version of the media criticism made popular by A. J. Liebling. Maybe not. Maybe we could get a job at the American Studies Center at the University of Sydney helping them understand contemporary culture in the USA? Maybe not. Maybe now that Wolfman Jack has gone to the great sound booth in the sky, XERF needs a replacement announcer on the night side? Maybe not.
All three of our writing heroes, Hemingway, Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson, seemed to find the obligations accompanying fame very disagreeable so maybe we can reconfigure the old F. Scott Fitzgerald wisdom to read “Living well (in obscurity) is the best revenge.”? If you don’t believe us, then ask author William Kotzwinkle if there is any truth in that amended quote.
Isn’t it amazing that the political commentators are making the assertion that the congressional representatives and the Senators are feeling pressure for the members of the 112th Congress to reach a fiscal cliff agreement now because of concerns about possible resentment for not getting a bipartisan plan to avoid the cliff, playing a role in their reelection as members of the 113th Congress. Isn’t there an old political adage that states that American voters have a short memory?
Winston Churchill may have predicted the fiscal cliff political stalemate when he said: “We conferred endlessly and futilely and arrived at the place from whence we began. Then we did what we knew we had to do in the first place, and we failed as we knew we would.”
Now the disk jockey will play “As Time goes by,” “the Alabama song,” and the Eagles song about James Dean. We have to go post a link to this column on Facebook. Have a “good night and good luck” type of new year.