We like to watch

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Sean Elder

Anyone surprised by the GOP sex club scandal, in which a RNC staff member dropped $2K of donor money at a bondage-themed strip club in LA, just hasn’t been paying attention. Republicans surpassed Democrats as the party most likely to be getting kinky a long time ago, and the fact that this fiasco came to light on Michael Steele’s watch only adds to the merriment. After Sarah Palin, he is their greatest gift to the Dems.

Voyeur, the club in question, has a show inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. That’s weird enough right there, and makes you wonder if the DNC might be more comfortable in a Clockwork Orange themed joint, wherein patrons eyes are taped open and forced to watch Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

But our days of self-abasement are behind us, at least for the time being. Having finally passed a health-care reform bill (now that was torture) we can afford to be high-minded in the wake of this mini-scandal. (I mean, come on — two thousand dollars? You can hardly get a week of valet parking for that in West Hollywood.) “If limos, chartered aircraft and sex clubs are where they think their donors’ money should be spent, who are we to judge?” a DNC spokesman told the Times, before covering the phone and bursting into laughter.

The Republicans, on the other hand, are just getting into the self-flagellation. Having fucked the pooch (sorry, even that is still illegal in LA) on health care, and having ceded their party’s future to a bunch of wingnuts, the GOP has only self-inflicted misery to look forward to. And I always knew they liked playing dress-up; they’ve been pretending to be the party of average Americans for so long that it’s finally caught up with them. Hand me that paddle.

Stop torturing us

Posted on May 16, 2009 by Sean Elder

It’s taken more than 100 days but this week was the first time I felt like my own personal honeymoon with Obama might be over. His decision to block the release of photos that depict US troops and agents torturing enemy combatants feels like a blunder on many levels: As much as I like his willingness to change his mind on issues when presented with new information (unlike old whatsisname), the rhetoric that followed his about face on this question (or “flip-flop” as the folks at Fox are already calling it) seems just plain wimpy.

“The president believes in this special case the damage that would be done to troops and our national security has not been fully presented to the court,” Robert Gibbs told the press corps (before having a tizzy over someone’s cell phone going off) on the same day that Obama said something about “a few bad apples” in the military. Conveniently ignoring the bad apples in the Department of Defense and the vice-president’s office who gave the go-ahead to torture people.

As much as Democrats still feel it necessary to proclaim that they love a man in a uniform, I think the notion that new Abu Ghraib like images would provoke more anti-American feeling (as the president readies himself for a June visit to Egypt and another encounter with the Muslim world) misses the point. What will the Arab press make of the notion that we have images so awful we don’t want them to see them? Give some credit to the power of the imagination. The transparency he campaigned on should be just that: a willingness to show the world what we have done and therefore more fully disassociate ourselves from it. To do otherwise makes him seem like Bush’s successor.

Nearly as disheartening was his decision, announced yesterday, to retain the military tribunal system Bush championed that tries terrorists not as ordinary bad guys — with human and civil rights — but as kind of super bad guys who should be tried secretly. The way they do in dictatorships. “This is the best way to protect our country, while upholding our deeply held values,” the president said.

O yeah, chief? Which values are those — the need to compromise on issues when being attacked by the right about being soft on national security? The belief that the person with the most authority, when it comes to issues of prisoner abuse and extralegal activities, is the one who stood by when such practices were going down in the past, or who listened to briefings about them and did nothing? It seems to me that Obama has some political capital now and, in Bush parlance, he can afford to spend a little. Less calibration, and caution, please. I keep thinking of the Cowardly Lion: he already had the courage, he just needed someone to remind him.

At Last

Posted on January 21, 2009 by Sean Elder

That was the song President Obama and his wife danced to at last night’s Neighborhood Ball, sung by Beyonce no less, reprising her Etta James impression from Cadillac Records. How perfect, not just because all the women (and some men) I know swoon for the first hunky president since JFK the way the strings swayed behind Etta as she celebrated the arrival of the love she had so long dreamed of, but because those of us pulling for Barack feel like we’ve been waiting a lifetime.

The country’s been waiting a long time, too. The president himself pulled from another book of standards in his inauguration address when he quoted scripture, saying it was time for us to put away childish things. Our last massive wake-up call came on 9.11, of course, when history gave us a vicious blow. Grow up, goddamit! the attacks that day seemed to cry. Stop pretending you have no role in the rest of the world, that you are somehow free from the cares that shape the rest of the planet, and there was a hopeful moment, in NY at least, when all the books on Islam and the Arab world were stripped from the shelves of the bookstores and a lot of people rushed to understand what had just happened.

You can’t blame Bush for the national somnolence that followed; if he and his handlers were determined to see the attacks in simple black-white, good guy-bad guy terms it was unlikely he was going to ask the country to do anything more complex. (Indeed, the words “George W. Bush” and “complex” seldom appear in the same sentence.) But by telling us to travel and shop and act as if nothing new had happened (until he needed the tragedy as an excuse to wage an unnecessary war), he was encouraging our national adolescence. And within months of September 11th, 2001, American Idol was on top of the ratings and we were lulled back into dreamland.

By evoking the first letter of Paul of Tarsus to the Corinthians, Obama seeks to wake us to tasks ahead, at home and abroad. For a lot of retirees, the dream is already over; those heavily invested in the stock market and on the verge of retirement have literally awoken to find that they are going to be living a lot less comfortably, and working a lot longer — if they can find a job in their sixties.

But there’s promise in that message. As sobering as his 18-minute speech was, it was also optimistic: We must do this, we can do this. He drew on history and our better nature. And this was not some Jimmy Carter-style scolding, he’s not talking about taking joy away; it was there in the presence of his daughters and in Aretha Franklin’s singing. And yes, you can still watch TV, and not just the news networks!

I’m not a snob; one of my favorite moments in television drama in the last ten years came on the old NYPD Blue. The irascible, always struggling alcoholic Detective Andy Sipowicz lost his son in the line of duty, and in a nightmare he sees the killing take place before his eyes and is helpless to prevent it. Too late he realizes the trucker in the baseball cap hauling his slain child away is Jesus, taking him to his reward. “All I wanted was a second chance!” Andy cries and the truck stop Jesus says, “What do you think this is?”

Andy awakens from his dream to find his new baby crying, in need of care. The task begins again and the hope is that he’s learned something.

Ghosts of elections past

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Sean Elder

If you are looking for giant spider webs, life-sized ghouls or plastic tombstones to adorn your front lawn with, I’m afraid they’re all in Northeast Philadelphia. The voters whose doors I was knocking on may be facing hard times but they’re still looking to give away candy on Halloween. These neighborhoods must be fun for the kids; they’re very family-oriented and many houses are haunted.

Haunted by the past, that is: the time when people had steady work and were optimistic about the future, their kids’ college prospects and their own retirement. Most of the voters I spoke with were talking about the economy, the scare they got when they opened their last 401K statement (George Will said “the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing they did not pay for”). One dad I talked to, the only black voter I met on my wandering, told me to save my convincing for someone else. “I’m convinced every time I talk to my daughter who’s stationed in Iraq and can’t come home,” he said. “I’m convinced every time I look at my bank statement.”

Many I talked to were close to retirement — or so they previously thought. The idea that McCain supported privatizing Social Security was enough to galvanize them, if they weren’t already. The idea of having their money tied to the volatile stock market was far scarier than those Obama masks they’re selling.

Health insurance was a big topic, too. There was a woman who told me both she and her husband were voting Democratic but their son, also on my list, was in a vegetative state. (“You can put him down too, if you want,” she said.) There was another mom, thinking of abandoning the Republican party for the first time, whose son had been on a methadone program, since closed: she was plenty scared, too. And there was the woman I met whose hair was missing from chemo. She was wearing a Phillies jersey and knitting a giant Phillies stocking as we talked. “Today’s a good day,” she said. “On good days I have enough energy to get mad at the Republicans.”

The fact that their team is heading for the World Series has made a lot of people happy; signs were everywhere and I even met a cat named Philly. One guy, mowing his lawn, stopped to tell me he and his wife were for Obama all the way and he was making a point of talking to his friends who were on the fence. Hearing I was from NY he shook his head about the fate of the Mets.

“I tell you what,” I said. “You vote for Obama and I’ll root for the Phillies.”

That’s a promise that’s easy to keep when they’re playing the Devil Rays.