I was going to blog this weekend and was thinking of calling it Two Kinds of Crazy but since then a) I got sick and b) the crazy has just multiplied…

My wife and I watched Black Swan on Saturday night (a screener DVD we had gotten our hands on) in part to take a break from the shooting news. A light alternative, no — an homage to many Polanski films I thought (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant all came to mind) and a very successful one. But Natalie Portman’s Nina is horror movie crazy while the shooter in Tucson was just…crazy.

It was also apparent, even on early Saturday evening, that we were in for a news cycle of blame and deny, with Sarah Palin’s defenders saying those weren’t cross hairs on the congresswoman’s district, for goodness sake! They were “surveyors’ symbols,” because she wanted her followers to…survey the districts of congress people who voted for health care, or something.

Calling something what it isn’t is a time-honored Orwellian kind of crazy talk, of course. Very big in politics, what with death taxes and death panels, for that matter. Though I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that Palin and the Tea Party’s shoot-em-up language made Jared Loughner shoot Gabrielle Gifford — but neither did it have no effect.

What strikes me at this juncture, when the stew is still bubbling and talk of guns and rhetoric and personal freedom is once again the staple of every talk show and many a water cooler conversation, is how many of the same people who demonize rock music and pornography and video games for contributing to a culture of violence refuse to see how their rhetoric might effect a nutter like Loughner. If you want to talk about personal responsibility (and the right loves to), talk about your own. Look in the mirror and see if you see some crazy person looking back at you.

Oops, wrong movie.

Has there been a stranger sight, this political year, than Barack Obama coming out to hold a press conference with Bill Clinton? Yes, possibly: Obama leaving the lectern to attend a holiday party while the former president held forth for another half-hour.

It reminded me of the time Frank Sinatra, having dissed Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll in general years before, had the King on his TV show — they even performed a duet together! By then rock had conquered the airwaves (and the post-GI Elvis had lost his mojo anyway) but to see the former rivals link arms was still striking.

This of course comes in the wake of pundits wondering if Obama was having his signature moment now with his great tax compromise, that (like Clinton after his midterm losses) he was finding his voice and his passion in the middle. Passion may not be the word you associate with Obama — he’s more Nat King Cole than Sinatra — but I think those who think his moderating trend is a sell-out weren’t paying attention during the election.

Obama did not win because he was a liberal, or a progressive. He won because a lot of independents and even Republicans were dispirited after eight years of Bush ineptitude, and many were truly appalled by McCain’s choice of running mate (forget the other nutsy trappings of his campaign) A lot of people thought they were voting for a moderate, and a lot of people were right.

For those Democrats who think back on the Clinton years fondly (minor military skirmishes, economic prosperity), remember how the left hated him them? To say nothing of the GOP (and the press!), especially the right wing of the right wing. After running an interview with Clinton in a recent issue of Reader’s Digest, my wife got an email from a reader reminding her of the 50-plus murders BC was implicated in. (Turns out Vince Foster was just the tip of the iceberg.)

Those people are still out there, hating on Obama now. In fact they’re driving the GOP bandwagon, dressing like Nazis and making John Birch books bestsellers. When I heard that they had discovered an arsenic-based life form in Mono Lake I thought, of course! It’s called the Tea Party. Let’s see if the GOP can swallow them without poisoning itself.

Ever been to see a play, staged a block from your house, about an issue that you were personally engaged in for five years? Neither had I. But having just come back from In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards at the Irondale Center, next to the Lafayette Presbyterian Church, was kind of like having personal history repeat itself, practically in my bedroom.

As my wife said when we went to see Fair Game, the movie about the Valerie Plame affair, “It makes you mad all over again.”

Difference was we weren’t personally involved in the hoax the Bush administration concocted to get us into Iraq, and 100,000 lives and a half a trillion dollars weren’t lost in the battle with Bruce Ratner over Atlantic Yards. Just a neighborhood or two, a poignant fact captured terrifically by the six cast members of In the Footprint. The script was all taken from interviews done with principals in the battle, and public records. (The fight’s real villains, like Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, wouldn’t be interviewed; he is played in performance by a basketball.) The overall effect is a bit like Anna Deavere Smith, if there were six of her, and she sang. The troupe responsible, the Civilians, calls it “investigative theater.”

Too bad the newspapers didn’t think of that! The whole side-splitting, gut-wrenching tale is brought to quick life, and early death (kind of like the Atlantic end of Fifth Avenue) — we were out of there in under two hours. That was about the time that Ratner, Bloomberg, Pataki and all the other crooks who concocted this canard thought it would take them to run away with a big chunk of BK real estate. As members of the advisory board of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, we helped slow them down; I  was instrumental in getting Jonathan Lethem involved (he is represented in the play), and we hosted a fundraiser at our house, featuring readings by Jhumpa Lahiri and Jennifer Egan that raised nearly 25 grand for the legal battle against Ratner and his take-it-and-like project. But that kind of money is peanuts to people like him and the Russian billionaire who helped salvage the deal.

Which is precisely the point.

It’s been fun watching the growing backlash against Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement that Hearst honcho Cathie Black would replace Joel Klein as NY chancellor of schools. I have sort of a love/hate relationship with the mayor myself — love the stance he took over the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy and wished for one moment that Obama had his balls in such situations.

But I have always hated his autocratic side, mostly as I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow Brooklynites in our losing battle against the Atlantic Yards development, which Mike helped grease the chute for. His attitude about that, as in most things, was “I know what’s best for the people of New York,” but in the appointment of Black that approach seems to be backfiring. First there are the teachers, who rightly wonder why the hell they have to be vetted and qualified to just teach kids math or history when this millionaire pal of the mayor’s can breeze into a job she knows nothing about, in a field in which she has no expertise (she sent her kids to private schools, as her parents did for her), all the while asking for their indulgence while she learns the ropes. Wouldn’t you be pissed?

Then there’s the general silence of the people in the media, the very folks who should be rushing to her defense, that has followed the shitstorm. That should tell you something right there. You know how when people are making odds on the Oscars they have to figure on the feelings of the Hollywood community: “Jeff Bridges is a good guy, he’s been doing an honorable  job in films big and small for years — let’s give him an Oscar!” The opposite might be true here. Not that I can find anyone who hates her, but there is a fair amount of resentment beneath the surface.

Bloomberg’s argument, when he isn’t busy acting offended that he even has to explain his actions, is that Black has done a bang-up job at Hearst. Really? She takes credit for bringing Oprah into the fold, though those in the know say that was really the work of Ellen Levine. And while she is proud of keeping Esquire afloat, have you tried reading it lately? Sure it’s not as bad as it has been since its glory days but it still seems like a shadow of its former self, an anonymous designed-by-committee men’s magazine rather than a beacon of intelligence and attitude.

Not entirely her fault, of course. But old media seems like a flotilla of Titanics these days and Black has done a middling, middle-management job of keeping her own sinking ship afloat. To call her a genius, or even an innovator, seems laughable. To call her chancellor of the schools seems, at this point like a long shot.

The Giants finally fulfilled my boyhood dream Monday night (even if I wish they had done it in SF, and I had been there to watch), a victory I have literally waited a lifetime for. And they did it the Frisco way, with a bunch of rookies, retreads, rejects and a little bit of reefer. I retired happily, hoping it wouldn’t take us another 56 years to get those rings.

Then I awoke to go vote, using New York State’s new confusing ballots, the paper kind that you fill out like a lunch order at Au Bon Pain and then run through what looks like a fax machine while some nice lady guarantees that your vote has been recorded. Personally, I liked the old lever system; when I pulled that big switch I always felt I was sentencing someone to death. (And yet there was George W, watching his team lose in Arlington…)

Pundits have already been projecting a Republican tidal wave for the midterms, and tonight’s returns seem to be bearing them out… sort of. As tired as I am of the kvetching about Obama I have heard from the hardly informed (and thanks to Barbara O’Dair for alerting me to What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far?, a site that lists such modest accomplishments as “Cut prescription drug cost for Medicare recipients by 50%” that you can dismiss by clicking buttons that say “I’m not impressed” or “Big fucking deal, what else?”) I am looking forward to the tar pit that awaits the GOP as it takes control of the House.

Besides, it’s all cyclical. My birthday began early tonight when we went to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson on Broadway, a ridiculously enjoyable rock revisionist musical about our most genocidal president. His brand of self-pitying populism — or “emocracy” as one of his supporters labels it — is seen through the prism of Tea Party histrionics and it’s a timely reminder that perpetual upheaval has been the way of our government since its inception. Throwing the bums out invariably gets you new bums.

Let it unfurl, like the man said.