One Hand Jerking (46 page)

It happened with the Super Bowl commercials. For example, the CBS network turned down a commercial which featured Mickey Rooney baring his ass, but it was pixilated on
all
the network news programs. Ironically, I have no idea what product was being advertised. Old asses, maybe.

In fact, the
Washington Post
published this correction: “The TV Column in the Feb. 8 Style section incorrectly described one of the Super Bowl commercials that were scrapped. The ad featured the bare bottom of Mickey Rooney, not Andy Rooney.”

All those old asses look alike.

And now, from the ridiculous to the sublime. . . .

I was touched and intrigued by the story of a woman, Sarah Scantlin, who was the victim of a drunken driver in September 1984. The driver served six months in jail for driving under the influence and leaving the scene of an accident. Sarah was 18 years old at the time. Now, after having been in a coma for 20 years, she finally spoke her first words. For years she could only blink her eyes—one blink for “no,” two blinks for “yes.”

“I am astonished how primal communication is,” her father said. “It is a key element of humanity.”

Early in February, one of the nurses at the Golden Plains Health Care Center in Hutchinson, Kansas called Sarah's mother, asked her if she was sitting down, told her someone wanted to talk to her and switched the phone to speaker mode.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Sarah, is that you?”

“Yes.”

“How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

Later, her mother asked, “Do you need anything?”

“More make-up.”

I was stunned by that answer. Could the concept of “more make-up” been somewhere in her consciousness at the moment she was struck unconscious because she had just won a spot on the Hutchinson Community College drill team and been hired at an upscale clothing store?

The nurses say that Sarah thinks that she's still living in the '80s. She knows what a CD is, and that it plays music, but she has no idea what a DVD is. When her brother asked whether she knew how old she was, she guessed she was 22. When he told her that she was 38 now, she just stared silently back at him.

Most poignant was that, although she began talking in mid-January, she had
requested staff members not to tell her parents until Valentine's day. She wanted to surprise them. Sarah is back in Kansas again.

Maybe it's because Tom Hanks will star in the movie version of Dan Brown's
The Da Vinci Code
—a novel which has already been translated into 44 languages and sold 20 million copies—that senior Vatican official Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone is suddenly telling Catholics not to buy or read the book, because it involves a painting with clues proving Jesus Christ was not the son of God, that he married Mary Magdalene, fathered a family and, for all we know, frequently used Day-Glo condoms as a method of artificial birth control.

Don Novello, who inhabited the character of offbeat priest Guido Sarducci on
Saturday Night Live
, appeared on MSNBC in his clerical costume to comment on this literary phenomenon:

“Starting in 320 A.D., popes have commissioned, preserved and collected works of art, and now this guy comes from nowhere, making a fortune from a book that is based on a painting
we own
. He used our painting for his own benefit. Where was he when we were taking care of it for 500 years—dusting it all that time, and keeping it away from mildew—where was he? And worse, he did it in a
holy
year. Holy years come once every 50 years—we put a lot of money behind planning and promotion—and he comes out with his book
then
. Year 2000 coincidence? He waited until a holy year, he jumped on our wave,
he stole our holy year
. If it's Mary Magdalene instead of St. John, where did St. John go? Did Jesus have to tell him, ‘Sorry, there's no room for you in this painting.' So send for the Da Vinci De-Coder Ring right now. . . .”

And now, on top of that theological controversy, there's the case of Terri Schiavo and her right to die. Consider the possibility that last-minute, unprecedented political pandering was based on a false premise that the Christian right put George Bush in the White House for a second term; that this myth stemmed from early exit polls in the 2004 election, where some pollsters included “moral values” as one of the reasons Bush was re-elected—what voter would ever have denied
that
?—when actually it was because of a combination of John Kerry's personality problem, Osama bin Laden's favorable review of
Farhenheit 911
and the historical fact that American presidents have never been changed in the midstream of a war.

The interference of legislators in a private medical situation boils down to a
matter of taxation without representation, as indicated by an ABC poll—conducted by telephone while members of Congress and the president were grandstanding their asses off in a display of bipartisan hypocrisy—a poll which found that 63 percent of their constituents supported the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube. The poll also found that 58 percent of
Republicans
believed that such intervention was inappropriate, and 61 percent supported removal.

Nonetheless, according to satirist Barry Crimmins, Republican mothers now admonish their children, “If you don't feed the vegetable, you don't get any dessert.”

And Don Novello alerted me: “I hear there are a lot of feeding tubes on eBay now they say are Terri Schiavo's, so collectors are being told to watch out for fakes. If I was in charge of realilty TV,
I'd buy them all
and put them in a box at the end of a football field and have Michael Jackson and Barry Bonds race—having to use
each other's crutches
—from the other end, grab as many as they can with one hand, like reaching in a jar for pennies on
Super Circus
, and see who gets back first with the most, without complaining.”

A media watchdog group, the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, affiliated with Columbia University, has just released its annual report on the news business, concluding that journalists should “document the reporting process more openly so that audiences can decide for themselves whether to trust it.”

Well, here's a case in point.

United Press International dispatched a story last week about a former U.S. Marine who participated in capturing ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and said that the public version of his capture was fabricated. UPI stated:

“Ex-Sgt. Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, was quoted in the Saudi daily
al-Medina
as saying Saddam was actually captured Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, and not the day after, as announced by the U.S. Army. ‘I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced,' Abou Rabeh said. ‘We captured him after fierce reisistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed. . . . Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam's capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well,' Abou Rabeh said.”

This story definitely had the ring of falsehood. Could it possibly have been a
fabrication
about
a fabrication? I contacted Pam Hess, the UPI Pentagon correspondent.

“My editor and I have been doing our damnedest to kill the story,” she told me. “It is actually a clean pick up from the Saudi press but obviously flawed. It came from our Lebanon desk, which translated and ran the story—standard procedures for a wire. However, this was obviously a huge story if true, and very controversial, and should have been run through me first, which it was not.

“So, the story came from UPI—but I don't recommend picking it up. Obviously fabricated. The Marines don't have records of the original source who makes the claims. I have recently heard from some guy who says the fact that the dates (the fruit) were yellow in the background suggest that Saddam was captured and filmed earlier than December—but I'm not sure that rises to the level of reportable.”

The story had already been reported by various local media and Internet listservs. Harry Shearer read it on his syndicated radio program,
Le Show
. When I informed him of its fictional nature, he thanked me for the heads-up and added, “Interesting that they'll run it on their wire before checking it.”

Especially since it's “obviously fabricated.”

The most significant aspect of this hoax is that, in the wake of an increasing incredibility of real news, there is an increasing credibility of fake news.

“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” —Henry Kissinger

 

Although
The Daily Show
is my favorite daily show, I'm occasionally disappointed in Jon Stewart as an interviewer. When former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was a guest, Stewart obsequiously lobbed softball questions at him. More recently, when former press secretary Ari Fleischer was a guest, Stewart didn't ask him anything about Jeff Gannon, the $200-an-hour gay prostitute-
cum
-Bush administration propagandist in the guise of a journalist, sitting in the fourth row at White House press conferences and asking ass-kissing questions.

When that same subject came up on HBO's
Real Time
, Bill Maher speculated that Gannon must have been getting it on with somebody in the White House. Then Robin Williams filled in the blanks with an implication that this somebody in the White House was actually Karl Rove. And Walter Storch, editor of the
Barnes Review News
, reported that “Karl Rove was seen by one of my
people entering a private homosexual orgy at a five-star Washington hotel over the Mid-Atlantic Leather weekend last year [2004].”

Stand-up comic Barry Crimmins envisions Gannon at a presidential press conference, wearing pink panties with a dog collar on his neck, and asking, “Who do you have to blow to get a seat in the front row?”

Crimmins, a political satirist and activist, has gone from writing for Dennis Miller to writing for Air America Radio. Now, about Miller, he says, “Listening to his act is no longer something we look forward to; it is more like getting stuck in the back seat of your pop's station wagon while he lectures you on ‘Americanism' through 30 miles of heavy traffic. . . . He has carved a place for himself on the Mount Rushmore of wrong-headedness, and there he will stay for years to come, a glowering, reactionary oaf for the ages.”

As a performer, Crimmins told me, “I've felt pain as I've watched hacks succeed in places where I was not welcome, but what the hell? Why should I expect them to allow me to stand on their soapbox to announce that their suds are polluting the river?”

In 1988, Crimmins was at CNN's New York studio to contribute commentary on the presidential campaign. He was chatting with CNN anchor Norma Quarles in the Green Room. “Suddenly she looked right past me and began sucking up to someone at a clip that was fantastic even for a corporate news anchor.” It was Henry Kissinger. Crimmins refused to shake hands with him. Later, Quarles asked him why. “Because,” he replied, “I have a strict policy of never shaking hands with war criminals.” The title of his new book—published, as is this book, by Seven Stories Press—is
Never Shake Hands With a War Criminal
. L.

According to
Advertising Age
, McDonald's has offered to pay popular hip-hop performers to infiltrate the fast-food chain's Big Mac into their lyrics. They will not receive an advance on royalties, but rather they'll be paid $5 every time such a song is played. Although the company will have final say over the appropriateness of lyrics, the singers will retain artistic control over how they're incorporated into the track.

Spokesperson Walt Riker explained that this concept is in line with McDonald's 2003 global marketing campaign aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds, which launched the
I'm lovin' it
slogan. “Each McDonald's market,” he said, “has the freedom
within the
I'm lovin' it
framework to design programs that best resonate with customers.” Already, Kanye West and Busta Rhymes have agreed to promote the Big Mac by mentioning it in their rhymes.

Ever since MC Hammer did it for KFC's popcorn chicken campaign in the early '90s, this radio version of product placement has continued to ooze its way into rap music. The BBC reports that “A whole string of products has enjoyed huge success in the United States after rappers started dropping brand names into songs—although not for marketing purposes but bling boasting. Among the happy beneficiaries were brands like Courvoisier, Gucci, Dom Perignon, Bentley and Porsche. Artists who have ‘referenced' well-known products include Jay-Z, 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.”

Thus, only ten airplays of a song including a brand name plug for the two-all-beef-patty burger would net $50 for 50 Cent. The implications of this whole practice are, er um, just delicious. Price wars, for example. What's to prevent Burger King from upping the payment to $7 per play? Would McDonald's then make a counter-offer of $10?

Or how about candidates running for political office who are desperately trying to reach that desirable demographic? I can hear it now, stuck into the middle of a rap: “Hillary Clinton was married to the first Negro president I mean this is what they used to call ol' Slick Willy with his little slick willy bein' the answer to the question ‘Wassup?' and you know for damn sure that's who we wanna see in the Black House is Hillary 'cause she's a real nigger lover you know what I mean dawg?”