The Rake Magazine

Author: Tom Bartel

  • Kiss This, Connecticut Voters

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    W, you’re a much better lover than Hadassah

    “If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England,” Mr. Lieberman said at a campaign event in Waterbury, Conn.

    This via the NY Times this morning, from a stump speech made yesterday by Joe “Swift Boat” Lieberman yesterday.

    Just remember: those of you who think that the Iraq war was wrong may as well carry those bottles of explosive shampoo on the plane yourselves, because you are helping the terrorists. All you majority of Americans who hate America, don’t forget to vote for Democrats, because, well, isn’t it clear by now? They hate America, too.

    Does anyone else find it strange that those who claim the terrorists hate us because of our freedom get so upset when we exercise some of that freedom to turn out one of the idiots who got us into this mess?

  • You Can Fool Most of the People Most of the Time

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    “You can waste your time on the little lies, but Americans have shown they are even more gullible when you hit them with the whoppers.”

    There was in interesting piece in the Strib this morning, from the Associated Press, noting that half of all Americans still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That proportion has actually increased from about a third who believed the administration’s fiction a year ago.

    So, you ask yourself: despite all the evidence and reporting to the contrary, why are Americans seemingly getting even stupider?

    One could surmise that those who believe the world was created in six days about 6000 years ago could be made to believe anything, of course. One could also suggest that it’s possible that some of us just haven’t progressed far enough along the evolutionary track to have discerned the difference between fact and fable–whether we’re talking about quantum mechanics or Donald Rumsfeld’s pronoucements.

    Speaking of Rumsfeld, who testified last week before Congress that he’d never been “overly optimistic” about Iraq, well here’s another swamp we’d like to sell you.

    Isn’t it great we have a press that actually does research to get the facts, rather than the lazy he said/she said crap that passes for reporting these days.

    Too bad nobody’s reading newspapers anymore.

  • Passing on Your Right

    The first ride I ever had in a Mercedes sedan was on the German autobahn in 1975. In case you aren’t familiar with the autobahn, it’s a speed freak’s dream: There is no speed limit, and the German autobahn cops drive Porsche Turbos so they can keep up.

    The right lane moves along at about 120 kilometers per hour—or seventy-five miles per hour. This is where you’ll find the Volkswagens. The left lane is where the fun is. There is where you find the sort of blitzkrieg spirit that inspired German automotive excellence and the manifestations thereof, such as BMWs, Audis, Porsches, and the venerable Mercedes Benz. There is where you get to experience the sheer terror that is 240 kilometers per hour in heavy traffic.

    Until a few years ago, it was my impression that the basic philosophy of Mercedes was to build the best (and most indulgent) car possible, and never mind the cost. The company was dominated by its engineers. The sales guys just had to sell a great car that would go 240 on the autobahn to people who knew the difference between left and right lanes, even in America.

    That all changed a few years back—about the time Toyota decided to make the Lexus. I understood what Mercedes’ problem was going to be perhaps before Mercedes did when my friend’s father, who got a new Mercedes every two years, came home one day with a Lexus. He wasn’t in a Mercedes for the rush. He was in it for the plush. And if he could get that for fifty thousand dollars in a Lexus instead of about twice that in a Mercedes … well, he didn’t get to be a business big shot by miscalculating the value of his investments.

    The upshot of this is that Mercedes began to build cars like the fifty-seven-thousand-dollar E-350 to compete directly with the Lexus. In doing so, they make some compromises. Are these compromises apparent to the pure left-laners. Yeah. But if you’re interested in keeping it real in the gridlocked Twin Cities, this car will do just fine.

    The first thing the Road Rake and I noticed was how eerily quiet it is. We were rolling down 494 at eighty-five miles per hour when RR said, “This car is really quiet.” And I replied, “Yeah, it doesn’t seem like we’re going eighty-five, does it.” “That’s eerie,” he replied.

    After taking pretty much the route the aforementioned friend’s father used to take from Edina to Minneapolis every day, mostly at a boring fifty-five miles per hour in traffic, the RR and I decided that this was about the perfect car for doing just that. It was the epitome of the smooth, compliant highway ride. The handling was responsive, but not as nimble as a smaller BMW-like sedan would be. You don’t have the feeling you can, or should, take a corner at ninety, but there’s no call for that on the Twin Cities freeway system anyway.

    The car, even with the six-cylinder engine in the E-350 (there’s an eight-cylinder model, the E-500), had more than ample power. At eighty-five miles per hour, there was still plenty of room for acceleration.

    The interior is huge, and as comfortable and well appointed as a wealthy man’s home office. There’s plenty of room in the back seat for double-dating, or whatever other endeavors you might find a back seat useful for. The overall look of the car is Mercedes classic. To my mind, one of the beauties of the Mercedes is that it doesn’t change much from year to year. It won’t be outdated any time soon.

    My only complaint about the car is the so-called “Command System,” which requires its own two-hundred-page manual. There’s the radio, the navigation system, the climate control, the mpg, the miles remaining in the gas tank, etc. ad nauseam, all contained in a less-than-intuitive dashboard control panel that rivals a 747 for complexity. I’m more of a purist who isn’t interested in information that isn’t relevant to the task at hand—driving—but if you are one of those people who hates being away from a computer, well, you shouldn’t be disappointed.

    Mercedes is still the benchmark for luxury, ride, and comfort. If you’re headed for the autobahn, even if it’s just the part between the burbs and downtown, you could do a hell of a lot worse. And if you ever do have an open left lane in front of you, this car will do what you ask it to. Just keep your eye out for the Highway Patrol in their Porsches.

  • A Special Skewer

    One must be awful careful these days when bringing up H. L. Mencken. The “Bard of Baltimore” was an inspiration to a generation of plain-talking columnists long before Molly Ivins or Maureen Dowd were even born—or before anyone in journalism worried about hurting people’s feelings. Mencken’s specialty was puncturing the pomposity and pointing out the peccadilloes of the privileged. However, he was no great champion of the common man. He reviled ignorance even more than he did corruption. As he said, “All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non sequiturs.” 

    According to Mencken, the main cause of ignorance was religion, especially the kind practiced by an “auctioneer of God,” i.e. a Protestant Bible-thumping tent revivalist—or, if you will, today’s television evangelist. Indeed, he maintained that one of the most destructive acts in the history of man was translating the Bible into the vernacular, thus making its fables accessible to the uncritical, uneducated vulgarian. These translations amounted to putting the Bible’s interpretation into the hands of the auctioneers instead of keeping it within the exclusive circles of the learned clergy of the Latin Church, which, “despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem.”

    While he had utmost disdain for bombastic preachers, Mencken reserved a special place on his skewer for those who, like William Jennings Bryan, made their political fortunes by pandering to the religious rubes. Mencken’s accounts of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 are entertaining for their piquant descriptions of the hypocrisy rampant among the citizens of Dayton, Tennessee. (It’s almost as if he, Jeremiah-like, foretells the “auctioneering” that would come from the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker two-thirds of a century later.) But the obituary he composed for Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate who led the prosecution of Scopes, and died five days after the end of the trial, is unique in its venom, not just for Bryan himself, but for his natural constituency: the inhabitants of “every country town in the South and West.”

    Here’s my favorite excerpt: “[Bryan] felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range … he was obviously happy.” In case you missed the “primate” reference, there’s another one further on: “The simian gabble of the crossroads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks, he was palpably uneasy.”

    But, even more damning than the mere fact of Bryan’s consorting with the rednecks, were his reasons for doing so. Mencken explained it like this: “He [was] deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty and fine and noble things … He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine … His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up—to lead his forlorn mob of imbeciles against the foe.”

    I keep a book of Mencken’s essays by my bedside and page through them when I’m bored with what I’m currently reading, or extremely tired of the predictability of those pale simulacra of Mencken who pass for newspaper columnists today. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to open a paper one morning and see what Mencken would have to say about Dennis Hastert and his “American Values Agenda,” or Hillary Clinton and her flag-burning legislation, or Michele Bachmann and gay marriage?

    Not that I believe today’s newspapers would dare print anything so vicious.

    Besides, what would really be the point? No one has yet improved upon Mencken’s assessment of such politicians: “The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”

  • Another Morality Lesson from Timmy

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    Some pills make you taller and some pills make you small

    If you didn’t get a big enough laugh out of Bush’s petty moralizing at his stem cell research funding veto ceremony, here’s one for you:

    Tim (I’m Only Looking Out for You) Pawlenty thinks the frequent television ads for prescription drugs are too much.

    Yup, Tim’s bravely willing to fight the power of the pharmaceutical industry’s massive lobbying and political contribution muscle to make sure you’re properly informed by your doctor about which sleep or erection inducing medicine you should take. (Don’t forget, too, that the ads won’t tell you in which order to take said medicine, depending on your wife’s mood.)

    Tim thinks that too many people are just going into their doctor and saying, “Gimme some of the uppers for my johnson and downers for afterwards,” without the benefit of an actual consultation with the expert on the other end of the prescription pen.

    Tim, if you’re want to start regulating advertising that’s injurious to our health, you really ought to start with Coca Cola and all the rest of the crap that’s full of high fructose corn syrup.

    Maybe if all those men who have lifestyle-induced diabetes ever ate a vegetable or took a walk, they wouldn’t have the infrequent erections and frequent urination that are keeping them awake in the first place. That will solve a lot of the pill problems right there.

  • Dopes on Science, Part II

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    Bush to stem cell researchers: “Up yours!”

    Well, it was a bit strange today to see Bush drag out the veto stamp for the first time in his presidency to kill the funding for stem cell research. “It crosses a moral boundary that our society needs to respect, so I vetoed it,” he said to the applause of hundreds of TV evangelists.

    Let’s not fool ourselves about what happened here. The Congress, up for election in a few months, can read the polls and see that the people want stem cell research to help provide an answer to so many medical questions. The President, on the other hand, who, thank God, will never have to again resort to stealing votes in Florida, Ohio, and the Supreme Court to win an election, was free to cater to the party’s conservative religious base and stand up for the unborn detritus of treatments for infertile women.

    Yes, Bush staked out the simplistic moral high ground on this issue, just as he did in Iraq. It’s just that things aren’t always that simple. While he’s saving the unborn, he just can’t seem to get excited by the reports that the pace of civilian deaths in Iraq now seems to be accelerating, or that Lebanon seems to be on fire, or that Iran, Syria and North Korea seem to be able to do pretty much exactly as they please without the deterrence provided by any credible leadership from the “World’s Only Superpower.(TM)”

    As we scrape the unused fertilized embryos down the lab drain instead of using them for research, I know I’m going to sure be thankful that he have such a moral man at the helm.

  • Why I Name My Cars

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    Gina L: A chassis shape we can appreciate

    It occured to me yesterday while reading a vapid article on the merits of “Post Modern Girlfriend” (I don’t believe it was in The Rake, but alas I myself suffer from vapidity often.) why I hate many recent BMWs.

    I have always understood “post modern thought” to eschew the past–including antiquated things like human emotion, sensuality and the like. For example, if these are the qualities of Post Modern girl, then I am a eunuch. And if these are the qualities of modern BMWs (which I believe they are), then I am turning Japanese for good (they only cars worth buying in the long run.)

    Let me explain. (I say that frequently.)

    “Hit with a Bangle stick” is the frequent nomeclature for the recent BMWs designed by Chris Bangle (and his Dutch sidekick.). I once had a Dutch Art Director work for me. He found my Midwestern attachment to voluptuous Swedish lovelies (wife, mom, etc.) and the beauty of the sunsets on Lake Superior outdated. Most of all he simply could not understand my emtional attachment to cars.

    To Coert (and I don’t think I am embarassing him) the automobile was a transportation appliance. He appreciated the odd design flourish in all his appliances (insisted on a Krups coffemaker that never worked,) but would never anthropomorphize his car. (My car–an Alfa Romeo–was called Gina after Gina Lollobrigida–an Alpha.)

    This may explain his fondness for East German swimmers.

    To me it also explains what PoMo designers like Bangle and his coetrie of Dutch acolytes are trying to do with automotive design. I believe they are attempting to sever any emotional attachment to one’s car and replace it with a cool appreciation for the logic of form.

    This is why they are fond of talking about “flame surfacing” and other odd things that are designed to capture bend and bounce light off, say, the hood of the Z4 convertible without giving any thought to how it makes someone actually feel.

    I for one have been and will always be more attracted to the shape of a chassis than shine of its door handles. That is why Ferraris will always sell, Sophia Loren will always be sexy and automotive designers that woship the PoMo will lack the mojo to make it past the first design cycle–and art directors past their first dates.

  • Timmy on Taxes

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    Ready. Aim…

    A big whoop engendered yesterday by the Growth and Justice gang’s ad in the Strib yesterday indicating the willingness of 200 upper income Minnesotans to pay more tax to fund education, transportation and health care got the expected response from Tim “I answer only to David Strom” Pawlenty: “If those people want to send their checks to the state, I’ll pose with them for a photo.”

    I can’t figure why I’d want a picture of me with Pawlenty, other than for target practice. (I once used a picture of the actress Lily Taylor that I picked up at a Walker screening for a target at the range, so why not? It’s just paper.)

    I should disclose that I was one of the signers of the ad, although I’ve long since stopped being a higher income Minnesotan. I did it not because I want my taxes raised, but because, since taxes have been lowered here, things have begun to go to hell. We need only look at the idiotic attempt to get contractors to bid on the remake of the Crosstown Highway-35W interchange–and finance it themselves–to see where Pawlenty’s tax cuts have left us.

    If you want further evidence, you could of course look at property tax increases of 10-12 percent per year in Minneapolis–a regressive tax if there ever was one–that comes about as a feeble attempt to make up for the state aid the city used to get.

    Since we got Timmy Taxcut, we’ve got fewer police, (and surprise! more crime.) We’ve got Minneapolis libraries that are only open 3 days per week, and we’ve got a transportation system that is costing us millions in lost productivity and fuel waste. But at least we can take the time we’re sitting dead on the freeways to count our tax savings.

    If everyone on that list of people who signed that ad would do as Timmy says and send in their check, the math tells us that would amount to $1.2 million. (200 earners of $300,000 each sending in 2 percent.) Indeed that entire amount is about 12 percent of what Minneapolis needs just to restore library service to what it was before the state cut off the funds.

    Of course, I’m willing to bet that group puts its money where its mouth is in other ways. I’m fairly familiar with the Minneapolis Library’s situation and there are a lot of those names on the big donor wall in the new library–among and right along side of the taxpayers of Minneapolis who voted to raise their own taxes to build the thing.

    My next contribution, though, is going to be to whoever can beat Pawlenty in November. We need a leader here, and he just doesn’t have anything deeper than the sound bite mentality of his childish response.

  • The Illusion of Cooperation

    Diane Arbus, whose retrospective is now on view at Walker Art Center, used her exceptional technical skill as a fashion photographer to create a world inhabited by circus freaks, the mentally handicapped, nudists, giants and midgets, and, even more disturbing, “regular” people made up to go out on the town. Taken as a whole, this work creates a community without typical boundaries of race, social status, or physicality. With the unflinching, semi-nude self-portrait taken early in her career and included in the exhibit, Arbus planted herself firmly in this community. It’s shot into a mirror, and this mirror serves as a metaphor for the whole of her work. Her empathy is apparent as she holds the mirror of her camera up to all her subjects, and sees herself.

     Community is an elusive—and illusive—concept. The reality is tougher yet. It’s become an industry in this country to destroy any illusion of cooperation. Ann Coulter trashes the 9/11 housewives as political opportunists and then gloats on television that she did it to sell books. Al Franken calls conservatives lying liars, and sells lots of books to the other side. Instead of using his convention speech to embrace a common future for Minnesotans, Governor Tim Pawlenty takes the opportunity to demonize gays and people on welfare.

    Politics is now being played as a zero-sum game. There can only be winners and losers. Politicians like Jim Ramstad, who would reach across an aisle to fellow addict Patrick Kennedy, are the ones who are marginalized. Ramstad will always win his sensible political district, but he’ll never wield the big stick in Washington because he’s unwilling to use it to punish.

    This corrosive behavior is particularly evident in “virtual” communities. Think of fiction, where someone like Vince Flynn or Cormac McCarthy can act out violent fantasies (and, we hope, exorcize them) within the safety of the printed page. As readers, we can participate to a degree, either in killing the bad guys with Flynn, or being a bad guy with McCarthy. The only rules are in our head. Online, anything goes as well.

    Online, anyone can create fiction without the hard work and discipline displayed by real writers or artists. The lines between creator and consumer aren’t defined; anyone can be an idea killer. Any discussion that starts in a civil fashion can career off in any direction, and often does. A perfect example of this occurred on the online forum Mnspeak.com the other day (disclosure: my son owns Mnspeak) when, believe it or not, a discussion of Minneapolis’ crackdown on housing violations morphed almost immediately into a discussion of German prepositions. That digression was characterized by its benign nature. Others can degenerate into ad hominem attacks fueled by commenters who intentionally try to derail any civil discourse for the purpose of calling attention to themselves, or even to intentionally destroy a community. When it happens, serious people get fed up and leave. When there are no rules, people who like to play by them simply refuse to play. It’s a game of a different nature and it’s as good an explanation as any as to why online communities tend to burn out.

    Conversation between people who actually have to face each other is less likely, one would hope, to end up in the ditch. When one actually listens to a correspondent, a conversation is more likely to ensue. Are you actually interested in what the person has to say, and are you willing to consider his view? Or are you debating rather than conversing? Are you trying to reach a solution to a common problem, or are you trying to score points? Is civility more likely because there can be consequences in a face-to-face encounter? When you can’t stand off from your targets like pundits or politicians do, or can’t hide behind anonymity online, the possibility of a smack in the face is always there.

    As repugnant as Ann Coulter already is, imagine her standing in front of a woman who watched on television as her husband or son burned alive in the World Trade Center. Would she be able to look into tear-filled eyes and deliver the same vitriol? Imagine Tim Pawlenty’s anti-gay tirade from the state Republican convention podium delivered right to the face of one of Diane Arbus’ transvestites. Would he have the audacity to do that?

    In one of her journals, Arbus wrote, “There is so much to learn, mainly it is never as good as you hope or as bad as you dread.” The majority of her photographs were made with a wide-angle lens that forced her to get very close to her subjects. These images prove that she was willing to get close enough to listen to and learn from people very unlike herself. It is that sort of communication that we should seek, even if that communication doesn’t necessarily lead to agreement.

     

  • Internationalism threatens America

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    Julie Quist wants to save your children from the horrors of knowledge about other countries.

    A story in the Strib today mentioned growing opposition in some quarters (such as the sixth district Republican ones that nominated Michele Bachmann for Congress) to the growing trend in Minnesota school districts to adopt the International Baccalaureate method of teaching.

    According to the opponents cited in the Strib, the IB is “un-American” because it “teaches global citizenship as a priority over American citizenship,” according to Julie Quist, VP of EdWatch, a conservative advocacy group.

    You may remember Julie as the wife of Allen Quist, the leader of the radical conservative attempt to take over the Minnesota Republican Party, and the Republican endorsed governor candidate who, thank God, lost the primary to Arne Carlson in 1994. (If you want to remember what that was about, look here.)

    If you want our state to be the international subject of ridicule, like the cretins in Kansas who wanted to teach creationism, look no further than the cretins at EdWatch. They are out there and want inform all education by the jingoist and radical Christian agenda they’re pushing. Now didn’t we just get all upset when the Saudis were doing the same thing?