The predicament of a woman who has Tommy tattooed across her tailbone and ends up marrying Jack is not unlike the predicament of a nation run by ideology instead of common sense. According to current vogue in politics, this woman should not flip-flop from Tommy to Jack, even though Tommy is in jail for raping her kid sister. (more…)

The gray region between sexism and misogyny is a gloaming filled with turned around street signs and delusions. I ought to know because I’ve been wallowing in it. I wrote in this space that Senator Hillary Clinton was marching like the Energizer Bunny off a cliff. I faulted her for playing the race card. I called her Pillory Clinton for coarsening the level of discourse in her campaign against Barack Obama by talking about his problem with white male voters. (more…)

Sometimes I think the all news all day formula is traumatizing society. The news—if you can call that weird concoction of anchor bonhomie and drivel news—is surpassingly negative, and in the interest of ratings the media rarely lose an opportunity to exaggerate the negative side of the news. News or what passes for it is about bad behavior, disaster, crime, nasty mouths, lies, spin, malfeasance—and a little upbeat story here and there as condiment. (more…)

Is that your start scuffed in your coat? I asked my wife the other day. I meant, of course, to ask if that was her scarf stuffed in her coat. It was a humble example of a spoonerism. I love spoonerisms. I think if we declared one day a week Spoonerism Day and observed it with crazed delight we’d take ourselves less seriously. Listening to the pompous asses who direct our affairs indulging in spoonerisms once a week would be a good antidote for the slavish seriousness with which we habitually take them.

We could mess with the oppressive logic of things and turn grave pronunciamentos all topsy-turvy. We could have a high old time at the expense of talking heads, headline writers, politicians, preachers, and everyone else inclined to telling us what’s important. We could make all the snake oil salesmen in the world reverse the order of their pitches until even they laughed at themselves. We could spend a whole day throwing verbal junk balls at each other and go to bed satisfied that the world might not be safer but it sure would be funnier.—DM

The media’s discomfort with subjectivism diminishes our culture. It encourages us to weigh our affairs without the necessary intellectual rigor.

It’s a given, for example, that a politician who changes his mind about something is a flip-flopper when the argument ought to be made that anyone who never changes his mind is a dangerous sociopath or at very least an untrustworthy ideologue. If we really want leaders who never change their positions upon reconsideration of the facts, then we don’t want a democracy. (more…)

With Hillary Clinton having recently made like a schoolyard bully, maybe this isn’t the right moment to bring up the issue of misogyny. Or maybe it is.

Anybody who thinks this is a dead-letter issue should take a look at those e-mailed erectile dysfunction advertisements bubbling up from the cesspools of humanity. Their revolting language is full of references to the male member as a weapon. They talk of overpowering, exploding and nailing women. They assure men “their” women will be delighted by this weaponization of sexuality. (more…)

Hickory dickory dock, Pillory Clinton is determined to turn back the clock, now borrowing $6.4 from herself in her Energizer Bunny effort to convince us we’re not ready to elect an African-American. That’s her message. She can disguise it with talk about Barack Obama’s inexperience and empty eloquence, but the message is we’re not ready to put racism behind us.

This quintessential power elitist and Washington insider will seemingly pillory the Illinois senator for anything she thinks will stick, including his so-called elitism, which is a scintilla of her own. In the name of giving us a real choice, she has buried the real issues under a heap of non-issues, such as her guileful gas tax holiday and the Jeremiah Wright flapdoodle. In the guise of being ready on Day One to take over she has demonstrated not only a startling hubris and pettiness but Washington dirt-mongering as usual. (more…)

The surpassing silliness of arguing about which politician has flip-flopped on an issue reminds me of my own flip-flopping around Oscar Wilde’s (inset) famous observation that we pretty much have the faces we deserve by the time we’re forty.

I’ve always loved his remark so much that I’ve neglected to notice that it flies in the face of my own experiences. I want him to be right just as the ninnies who complain about flip-flopping want to be right. But a soldier’s long-held photographs have prompted me to confess I have my doubts.

They’re the recently published photos of the staff at a Nazi concentration camp having themselves a high old time, picnicking, singing, playing accordions and slapping each other the back. Look at those faces: hardly a demon among them. Just folks. (more…)

America is haunted by The Other, by otherness. The fastest approach to an understanding of this is to consider the photographs of the people we send to Washington. They don’t look like our demographics. They look northern European.

We look for The Other to determine who we don’t want in our churches, our neighborhoods, our schools. Worse yet, we look for The Other to determine who should not be helped by our hard-earned tax money. Much of our historic resentment of taxes is actually an unwillingness to provide public help to people unlike us.

In our quest for The Other we have at times considered Asians as well as Italians, Jews, Greeks and other Mediterranean people as non-whites, and today we are inclined to consider Arabs and Hispanics in the same light, whereas at least 47 percent of our Hispanic population identifies itself as white. (more…)

There are many ways to walk down a street in New York City.

You can walk like the Grim Reaper, caring less.

You can walk as if people are supposed to notice you and reward them with an ostentatious, What’re you lookin’ at?

Or you can smile at the faces and demeanors you like and hope for the best. That’s not unlike taking an experimental drug. If it works it just may give you a new lease on life. If it doesn’t work, you’re just another unsung hero.

There are many other styles. Oblivious is good, if you’re seven feet tall or old and brittle. (more…)