What does it say about our nation that Time magazine has put Glenn Beck on the cover? Other bloggers have already weighed in on the sins of omission committed by the article’s author, David Von Drehle — most notably that 62 of Beck’s sponsors dropped his show after he called Obama a racist who hates white people (presumably his own mother and grandmother and nearly everyone in his administration). Or that the green jobs “czar” that Beck drummed out of office was responsible for the group that stoked the Beck boycott. Or that he was against our health care system before he was for it. 

Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and others have done a great job of holding Beck’s feet to the fire but there is a danger, I think, in treating it all as comedy. (Beck himself used to stand-up, and in a sense still does.) The importance of his importance is that he lies — consistently, and shamelessly — and now one of the prominent news weeklies in America has endorsed some of those lies. (The fact that the term “news weekly” in becoming as anachronistic as “books on tape” is another topic.) Truth matters, whether it be the president of Iran lying about the Holocaust or Beck lying about how many people showed up to protest Obama in Washington last week. 

The Park Service quit estimating the size of crowds in the Mall years ago, so tired were they of being pilloried by protestors of every political stripe for over or underestimating numbers, so the job falls to independent statisticians, who get quoted in liberal papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. They set the number at about 70,000 and Beck famously upped the ante to 1.7 million quoting as his source “the university of — I don’t remember.”

The university of I don’t remember! I think I went there. When you can pull numbers out of your ass and source someone who can’t be fact-checked, your well into the field of true demagoguery. And while we’re in the land of make believe, let’s talk about that “czar” thing for a moment: Czar has become, over the last few administrations, shorthand for any appointed administrator appointed and not vetted by congress or the public. (Bush had far more than Obama.) But Beck hates them in part because — they’re called czars! As in Russia. 

Forget about the fact that the Russian czar, or king, was overthrown by the Bolsheviks and their allies in 1917 and that the commies didn’t have any czars in their government. (Dictators, yes.) You are muddying the argument with facts again! Looking it up is beside the point. History books are as soiled as mainstream newspapers. The left has equally lamentable conspiracy theory nut-jobs — 9.11 anybody? — but so far they haven’t made the cover of Time magazine. Maybe it’s all just a desperate play for readers (the fact that you only see Time when you go to the dentist proves my assumption) but I worry that, in this case, the journal might be right about its pick. Welcome to Beckistan.

Face it, boomers: we’re starting to die off. And it ain’t just rockers who shot their hearts, minds and livers on earlier excesses. It’s more sober and seemingly steadfast fixtures like Mary Travers (72) and Henry Gibson (73), claimed by complications from chemo and cancer, respectively. 

Travers, the blonde sylph of Peter, Paul & Mary, got the bigger headline on the obituary page, and rightly so: She was what Debbie Harry was to punk music, the friendly and even seductive face (and voice) of folk music and by all accounts the real deal, a “Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and coffee houses that nourished the folk music revival,” William Grimes writes in the Times obit. 

Gibson was more like one of those cutouts standing behind the Beatles on the cover of Sgt Pepper, an unassuming figure whose parodic poems and halting delivery we used to imitate after Laugh-In. But I always think of him in Robert Altman’s movies, Nashville and especially The Long Goodbye. There he played the quack Dr. Verringer, who publicly humiliates the alcoholic writer Roger Wade (played to great effect by Sterling Hayden) in a cringe-inducing scene set at a beach party in Malibu (“Sign the check, Roger”).

Altman had a great talent for seeing what others didn’t in his actors; Gibson was known as a gentle flower child so the director cast him against type as villains, so his sweetness turned smarmy and even poisonous. And while it was difficult to imagine him as a country star, the nasty temperament behind his Nashville character’s upbeat patriotism resonates even today. 

As for the cancer, well it’s always something, as the lady said. Yesterday I heard Marianne Faithful singing Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” and was struck by this verse: “When we’re older and full of cancer/It doesn’t matter now, come on, get happy/’Cause nothing lasts forever/And I will always love you.” Nilsson died of heart failure (see rockers, above) while former junkie and Stones groupie Faithful keeps on ticking, miraculously. Go figure.

The news on cable last night had to do with Jimmy Carter’s interview with Brian Williams, in which he bluntly said much of the enmity toward Obama was guided by racism. “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” said the former president (and Georgia governor).

Meanwhile, members of the House rebuked South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” at the president last week while trying to distance themselves from the notion, articulated by Maureen Dowd and others, that the outburst was motivated in part by racism. “I did not take a racial connotation from Mr. Wilson’s remarks,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader. Wilson did not, after all, add “boy” to the end of his remarks as Dowd suggested he wished to.

And then there was this excerpt from yet another Bush book by former White House speechwriter Matt Latimer, in which GWB is quoted weighing in on the talent who would replace him. He presciently called the McCain campaign a plane crash in the making (and dismissed Sarah Palin as “the governor of Guam”) but said this about Obama:

“After one of Obama’s blistering speeches against the administration,” Latimer writes, “the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off. He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. ‘This is a dangerous world,’ he said for no apparent reason, ‘and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.’ He wound himself up even more. ‘You think I wasn’t qualified?’ he said to no one in particular. ‘I was qualified.'”

Leaving aside the question of which candidate was more qualified when headed for the presidency, I was struck by Bush’s use of the word “cat.” I don’t think 43 went around using hepcat jive when addressing most issues, though it’s fun to think of Lord Buckley as secretary of state. And I can’t imagine the daddy-o in chief calling anyone else a cat; I think it was some sixties knee-jerk reaction, a shortened version of “spade cat” which makes one wonder what other visions our Condoleezza-loving ex-prez had dancing in his head. 

I was never naive enough to think that Obama’s election meant we had transcended racism in this country, and it was no surprise to see that the states where he lost looked like a map of Dixie. But I didn’t expect the specter of Bush going all Superfly on us, of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor sharing a smoke and a smile in heaven. Can you dig it?

Took my kids to see Hair this weekend –the Broadway revival of the sixties musical, not the stuff in the trap of my daughter’s shower, though I’ve showed her plenty of that. The last musical I had seen was South Pacific, back in the spring, and that had set me to thinking about my parents’ youth: my father served in the Solomon Islands, my mother met him in the Marines not long after. Hair was a different sort of flashback of someone’s youth — though not exactly mine. 

“So were you like that, Dad?” my daughter whispered during the first act as the Tribe gamboled across the stage. 

I looked like that, I guess, though I never really felt like part of the tribe. Maybe it was my age, the timing of being at the tail end of the baby boom. I remember going to see Hair at the Curran Theater in San Francisco in 1969 with other members of my high school drama club. Before the show I ducked into a head shop at the foot of Haight Street with Nancy Lardner. We were admiring the drug paraphernalia beneath the counter when she became aware of the weekend hippie ogling her in the doorway. 

“Far out,” said the guy. He wore a turtle neck and a pendant and had his two extra inches of hair combed down over his forehead. “I can dig it.” He was practically licking his lips looking at Nancy. 

“That guy is giving me the creeps,” she said as we left, and if we had ventured up into the Haight-Ashbury we would have seen more signs of the dying scene: hard drugs were replacing the free acid, teenage runaways were the prey of chicken hawks. 

Some of us already thought the musical was kind of square then, with the cardboard cutouts of parents the kids used for target practice and the kind of boring trip scene that makes up most of the second act. But then, as now, there were moments like sparks, especially the finale when the doomed Claude, headed for Vietnam, sings the opening lines of the big finale, “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In).” It’s chilling still and the revival manages to cut through ages of irony and get back to the heart of youth’s eternal questioning. 

I was struck by another irony: my parents willing sacrifice to a greater cause, a just war, and our generation’s sense of being sacrificed for an unjust war. But there wasn’t time to explain that to my kids. My son left at intermission to go to a party, and my daughter fell asleep. Outside the theater they were selling official Hair bandanas, fifteen bucks a pop. You could use one to wipe your eyes.

My son and I went to MOMA yesterday to take in Monet’s Water Lilies, or dive in I should say. The 40-foot wide triptych (which I vividly recalled from the last time they did this show) is the kind of canvas you can disappear into and many of the museum’s members seated before it appeared to be quite lost. 

We then took a stroll though some of MOMA’s permanent collection, and hence a history of modern art (Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Warhol) — sort of a downward arc for me. By the time we got to the seventies I found myself thinking of food, and I’m happy to report that the cafe on the second floor (thanks to Danny Meyer) has the best grub of any museum I’ve ever visited. The absence of surly servers was disorienting, though. 

Even more discombobulating was the way a number of visitors now experience museums: through their iPhones. My son was taking pictures of different paintings that struck his fancy (one of Jasper John’s flags, Picasso’s Charnel House) but soon I realized half the people there were doing the same thing — and quickly. Stop, point, click, move on. And a number of them took pictures of the wall text too, the better to later read up on what they couldn’t stop to savor.

Huh? To me the great joy of going to look at paintings lies in just that. It’s one thing to read about Pollock, or see a movie about him, and something else altogether to stand before one of those massive drip paintings and get some sense of the action and emotion that went into making them. if you want little images of art you can find them online, better than anything you can capture with your phone. For a lot of people it seems to be a way of charting their existence, a sort of Kilroy-was-here approach to art and life. Maybe they’re making some sort of statement, like Banksy — some sort of massive prank, a work of art in itself. The upside is that it leaves me more time to linger.