Day: January 6, 2006

Reach Out and Touch No One

Maureen Dowd in Saturday’s Times:

Doing the math, you’ve got to figure that the 12 wise men and one wise woman had about 30 seconds apiece to say their piece to the president about Iraq, where vicious assaults this week have killed almost 200 and raised U.S. troop fatalities to at least 2,189.

It must have been like a performance by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which boils down the great plays and books to their essence. Proust is “I like cookies.” Othello raps that he left Desdemona “all alona, didn’t telephona.” “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” condense into “The Idiodity.” “Henry V” is “A king’s gotta do what a king’s gotta do,” and “Antony and Cleopatra” is “Never get involved in Middle Eastern affairs.”

Beyond taking a class picture ringed around Mr. Bush’s bizarrely empty desk – a mesmerizing blend of “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Last Supper” and a “Sopranos” ad – the former secretaries of state and defense had to make the most of their brief colloquy with W.
…

Sure, he has A.D.D. But he just spent six straight days mountain-biking and brush clearing in Crawford. He couldn’t devote 60 minutes to getting our kids home rather than just a few for a “Message: I Care” photo-op faking sincerity?

Bush allowed five to 10 minutes for interchange with the group.

Oh, to be young again

… and stupid.

Three 20-something motorcyclists rode alongside NewMexiKen as I drove home from the store this afternoon. As his two companions kept watch for police cruisers, three times in fewer miles one of the cyclists gunned his bike to about 75 mph and rode vertically (on the rear wheel) for a quarter-mile or so. This on a major street in traffic in daylight.

No harm done I suppose. Halfway fun to watch. But really!?!

Western icons

Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter, mentioned just below, does make at least one interesting claim:

The movies, by their nature, favor only a few stars, and only a few national heroes. Of the thousands of interesting characters who played a part in winning the West, only a bare handful have any real currency with the American public now. Iconographically, even Lewis and Clark haven’t really survived, though Sacagawea has. With the possible exception of Kit Carson, none of the mountain men mean anything today. Kit Carson’s name vaguely suggests the Old West to many people, but not one in a million of them will have any distinct idea as to what Kit did.

The roster of still-recognizable Westerners probably boils down to Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy the Kid, and perhaps Wild Bill Hickok. …

Skimpy as the image bank is for white Westerners, it is even skimpier for Indians. My guess would be that only Sacagawea, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo still ring any bells with the general public. Crazy Horse, who never allowed his image to be captured, is still important to Indians as a symbol of successful resistance, but less so to whites. Even a chief such as Red Cloud, so renowned in his day that he went to New York and made a speech at Cooper Union, is now only known to historians, history buffs, and a few Nebraskans.

At the broadest level, only the white stars Custer, Cody, and Bill the Kid, and two tough Indians, Sitting Bull and Geronimo, are the people the public thinks about when it thinks about the Old West.

NewMexiKen would add Wyatt Earp, but otherwise thinks McMurtry is correct. Anyone feel differently?

Five books in five days

NewMexiKen decided a forced march was a good way to stimulate a little more reading (that wasn’t on a computer screen). So yesterday I stacked five recent acquisitions to my library on the coffee table and dug in, telling myself I would get through all five (and enjoy them, dammit!) in the next five days.

The first, which I began and completed last evening is Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter, a brief, nonfiction survey of several western U.S. massacres. While interesting in parts, with well-crafted sentences, this book has little to recommend it. It’s as if McMurtry took some cursory notes on 3X5 cards, somewhat organized the cards, and transcribed the notes. The result is disorganized, almost stream of consciousness and really not detailed enough to merit value as a history of the horrific incidents he includes.

NewMexiKen is a big fan of McMurtry’s fiction and nonfiction. This book does not measure up. (See also here for another review.)

Later last evening I got a headstart on day two, Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. More later.