You’re actually mildly impressed with Scott McClellan? Really?

Yeah. I can’t really believe it myself, but it’s true. I’m kind of sort of impressed with Scotty boy, for having the balls to not only write but actually publish his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

Who knew the little Oompa-Loompa had a pair that big. I mean, really. Think about it. Considering how scary these particular Republicans are. I know what you’re thinking? They’re all really, really scary. And you’re right, Virginia, they are all really, really scary, but the bunch Scott is “outing” are particularly so, you got to admit. Especially that Cheney [shiver].

Of course, the details of the book and the “fire storm” surrounding the recent “accidentally early” publication are not really worth rehashing. What is worth pointing out is that Scott is a little fry in comparison to the big bad giants that he is “mouthing off” about. And, unlikes previous defectors from the Bush compound and public, i.e. published, detractors of Bush policy, Scott was a member of the original inner circle. He’d been with Bush since his Texas Governor days, rising up through the ranks to take on the position of Press Secretary after his “good friend” and so-called mentor, Ari “Needle-Head” Fleischer, who wrote his own gutless tale about his time as Press Secretary for W. In an interview on NPR, Fleischer repeatedly claimed that it “breaks my heart” what Scott has written in his book, because he, Ari, just can’t understand where it comes from. Of course, I, along with so many others no dabout, were thinking: Really, Ari? It breaks you’re heart? Because the popular consensus is that you don’t have a heart? But you do have a very shiny and oddly appealing bald head. Ooo, can I touch it?

Prick that Ari is, he had no problem blathering about a private phone call that he and Scott had just before the news broke, which of course added to his, Ari’s, so-called heart break. B-O-O H-O-O! Ari then proceeded to attack McClellan, saying that if Scott had objections about the Iraq policy why did he not object? Or, why did he not simply step down? Why didn’t he quit?

Ari is not the only one to make this claim, and he won’t be the last. It is one of the major talking points against the book. But I think I understand why Scott did it. And it isn’t because of Scott’s great affection of the President, nor is it about giving the Prez and his advisers the benefit of the doubt, both of which are Scotty’s talking points in defense of said attack. When you’re in a position like that, you tow the fucking line that your Boss has given you. Everyone knows, and everyone does it? Especially if you’re a Republican — it’s just the way they operate. How many times at work are people asked to do things that they believe to be wrong or unsavory or whatever? It happens all the fucking time. And as much as we’d like to take a stand, we do not. We do as we are told.

Sure, that my sound wishy-washy, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Most people are wishy washy when it comes to such things. Not to mention it would have made no fucking difference if Scott had resigned. He’d have received the same treatment he is receiving now. And he would have still written the book. It might have been a slightly different book, but he still would have written it. Also, it might not have had the impact, and thus the sales, it is currently enjoying.

The money issue is another point of attack. The claim that Scotty is just trying to make money, that this was predictable. I would not argue with that. But I would also say, So fucking what? I don’t blame Scotty anymore than I blame Paul O’Neil or Richard Clarke, the latter of which btw McClellan apparently apologized to for attacking him, Clarke, for his book Against All Enemies when it was published. Interestingly enough, Clarke also has a new book out, entitled Your Government Failed You. I think Clarke returned to non-fiction because his fiction wasn’t very good. I couldn’t finish either of his two novels, and I really wanted to enjoy them. The point is this is what people in politics do, what they have always done, what they will always do. Sorry if that disillusions you. Perhaps you should go back to the land of gumdrop flowers and cotton candy clouds.

But does this make Scotty a hypocrite? Sure. But, as I once told my students when I taught freshman composition, being a hypocrite is pretty much the definition of being an adult. It’ll happen to you too. Still I give the chubby little former Bushy kudos for finally standing up. Also, he’s been quoted as saying he likes some of Barack Obama’s ideas, how the Democratic front-runner wants to govern from the middle, by building consensus across the isle, which was what W claimed to want to do, what Scott said he witnessed him do as governor of Texas. That just makes me like him a bit more — the Obama thing, not any of the Bush stuff.

Scotty’s disillusionment comes from his naive assumption that W would continue to govern from the middle. That and the fact that he, Scotty, had to take over for his buddy and mentor, Ari, at a time when things really sucked, and he, Scotty, had to pretty much fall in his sword and pass on lies and misinformation for the president that he admired. He felt used and disappointed. So, he wrote a book. Now he’s being attacked. And he is not backing down. And I admire that. Because it would be easier to just lay down and keep your mouth shut.

I’m not sure if this is relevant, but shortly after the news broke and Scotty’s book was all over the news and internet blah blah blah, I looked him up on wikipedia. Turns out Scott and are about the same age. That’s right my boy Scotty is a GenXer. And his standing up to a knuckled headed, ego run amok bunch of Boomers like Bush and Rove and company. (Demographically speaking, Cheney is not a Boomer, but he’s a scary fucking dude.) Perhaps this is a lame reason to feel sympathy for the likes of Scotty McClellan. After all, he was part of an administration that lied to the American people and sent thousands of US Soldiers off to die for a war that was in his own words “a war of choice” not of necessity. All true, but at least his trying to make some kind of amends, and make a chunk of change in the process. But mostly it is the making amends that I’m focusing on. Which is more than you can say the likes of stand up guys like Rove and Fleischer not to mention Bush and Cheney and Rice and the rest of the assholes who will defend their position until they die and hopefully board the Doomed to the Hot Place Express.

For some SPAM the way to save money

That would be the meat-like product in a can, not the unwanted emails in your in-box for male performance-enhancing drugs or low low mortgage rates or whatever. In any case, according to Generation X Finance sales of this crap is on the rise.

Yak! I’d sooner eat our pet guinea pig, which probably really boges (does anyone say that anymore – boge?) people out. It definitely creeps my wife out when I joke about it and of course I never say such things around my daughter. But in fact guinea pigs are a source of food in some parts of the world. Wikipedia says so. So there. The word is they’re kind of pork-like, and I couldn’t help thinking that we should have more than one guinea pig. You know, for when the society collapses and food is hard to come by and all that. We have a descent sized back yard; we can grow veggies and raise guinea pigs. We’d have it made in the shade, as Potsie from Happy Days was so fond of saying.

Glamorama

I’m still reading this Brett Easton Ellis novel. Yeah, I know. What can I say? I’m a slow reader. Always kind of have been. When I was kid I had comprehension problems. To help it I had to read stories from the newspaper with my mom and then tell her what I’d read. I became a pretty careful reader early on, and as a result a slow reader. I suppose it was inevitable that I become an English major in college, although I never like English class very much, until I got to college. Then…..

Anyhoo…I’m almost finished with Part 3 of Glamorama, on page 319 of 546. In some ways it feels as if the narrative moves too slowly, and yet I find myself caught up in it, despite the shallowness of the characters and dialogue, the preoccupation with looks and name brands, celebrities of all sorts blah blah blah. The conversations that take place are of the type that if I heard them out in public I’d cringe, and want to move away from the people having them just so that I wouldn’t have to hear it. So why am I compelled to read such dialogue? For that matter, why do I find the characters and dialogue interesting? Because the truth is I do not have to force myself to read this book. True, it’s taking me awhile to finish it but that is due to a lack of time, not a lack of interest.

Of course, the difference is that this is fiction, a reflection of the reality, a comment on the reality, even a satire of the reality, and not the actual reality. There is more going on her then just the vacuous chit chat of Victor Ward and his entourage or whatever.

The wikipedia entry for Glamorama dubbs it a satire, similar to American Psycho, but where AP was satirizing consumerism, Glamorama is about our cultural obsession with celebrities and beauty. The entry also provides an interesting note about the similarities between the novel and the Ben Stiller movie Zoolander, and states that Ellis at one point claimed to be considering a law suit and then later that he couldn’t talk about it due to an out of court settlement. I’ve seen Zoolander, but it’s been awhile, and I don’t remember it all that well, and at the time I hadn’t read Glamorama, of course, nor was I aware of the plot of the book.

An interesting device in the first part of the book, set in New York before the real plot begins in earnest, is the repetition of the phrase We’ll slide down the surface of things… , which is taken from the U2 song, Even Better Than The Real Thing, a song I recognized immediately upon hearing it.

It seems to set the tone and initial motion of the plot in the first part of the novel, i.e. Victor Ward’s slide down the surface of things into public humiliation, losing his supermodel girlfriend Chloe, when she realizes that he’s been cheating on her with another model, Alison Poole, who also dumps him, when he’s busted cheating on both of them with an ex-girlfriend from his college days at Camden, the college setting for Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction, not to mention the college the main character, Clay, from Less Than Zero attends. Also, Victor loses his hip position as club manager for scary dude boss Damien because he was dealing behind the boss’ back to open his own club — a big no no apparently in this world. But he still seems to hold out hope afterwards that he’ll get a role in Flatliners II.

The second part of the novel (although it may have begun in the first part) features a device in which Victor describes what is happening to him as if it scripted and being shot in a movie. He takes his cue on what to say and how to feel from an imaginary director. I swear I had this precise idea years ago, before the book was published. Dammit! If only I’d gotten my slacker ass in gear, I’d be reaping the benefits of such a brilliant idea.

According to the wikipedia entry, the latter parts of this book get pretty violent, like American Psycho violent. Interestingly enough there wasn’t the uproar about it that there was with American Psycho. Why not?

In any case, perhaps Glamorama is a book worth rereading now because of this theme articulated in the wikipedia entry:

…the parallel between the fear of the unlikely, horrible fate of being killed by terrorists and the fear of the extremely likely, rather less horrible fate of being unable to live up to the beauty of professional models. Both fears are fed by the media.

Although ten years after the publication of this novel, the fear of being killed by terrorists doesn’t seem nearly as unlikely as it did then, even though it may in fact be just as, if not more, unlikely. But now more than ever both terrorism and celebrity are fed/fueled by the media. Was Ellis once again far ahead of his time? As some claim he was with American Psycho?

A review from The Guardian touches on what I consider to be one of Ellis’ main themes, when it states: At the same time, it shows that everyone in Glamorama is reprehensibly lacking in real feelings. That theme is the subjugation of real feeling by intensity of sensation, definitely a dominant tone in this novel so far. And I haven’t even gotten to the extreme violence in it yet.

Defining Gen X is contensious business

A look at the entry for Generation X (the generational term not the Douglas Coupland novel) on wikipedia just shows how problematic it can be to define this generation.

The page is prefaced with this:

This page is currently protected from editing until disputes have been resolved.
This protection is not an endorsement of the current version. See the protection policy and protection log for more details. Please discuss any changes on the talk page; you may use the {{editprotected}} template to ask an administrator to make the edit if it is supported by consensus. You may also request that this page be unprotected.

Yeah, right. Like disputes are ever going to be resolved. Now any additions or corrections have to go through a vetting process.

Curiously, the wiki pages for Baby Boomers and Generation Y do not have this particular problem, altough Genereation Y has “multiple issues.” No surprise there. HA!

Wow. That was a surprising short post for me. Hmm. Perhaps I’m finally getting the hang of this blogging thing. Although it does bring up a curious –

Whoa, whoa. Chatty Cathy. Clip your string. No one needs to know.

Oh. Yes. Of course. Sorry.

No problem. Now pass the Frank’s hot sauce, will ya.

Certainly.