The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Come One, Come All

    Not too long ago, I worked at a suburban branch of a major weight loss chain. As day jobs go, it wasn’t too bad. We wore our own clothes with understated name tags—no absurd lab coats or ill-fitting logo’ed shirts. The job consisted of light filing and listening to lite rock. As weight loss consultants (Not “nutritionists”! Not “dietitians”! Liability! Danger! Danger!), we got to feel a vicarious thrill from time to time when a client would lose a couple of pounds over the course of a week—not to mention the ecstasy of monitoring our own body weight free of charge.

    Most of our clients were busy professional women looking to lose those last ten pounds’ worth of desk-job/veal-pen pudge. An FBI profiler would categorize them as white, affluent, pleasingly plump. Some were serial snackers, others spree eaters. Our job was to lure them into our strip-mall HQ and make them eat our pre-portioned vegetables.

    The bulk of business for this international company came from women who lost and gained those same ten pounds over and over and over again. It worked like this: Once a client hit her goal, she would graduate to what was known as the “maintenance” phase of the program. The maintenance phase transitioned the client from weekly check-in meetings to a monthly check-in. Over the course of a month, believe me, that number on the scale can sure creep back up. But no matter, you can always go back to your weekly meetings, any time you want. We’re here for you, to support you. Eternally.

    Life at our little strip-mall diet club couldn’t be all smiles and sugar-free chocolate-flavored calcium-fortified chew treats. There were unpleasant tasks, too. One was something referred to as “Reminder Calling.” Between client meetings, we consultants had to call folks who’d missed their weight loss check-in. Welcome to the Hotel Minnesota. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

    The list of call-back numbers was very long. In my weeks of experience as a weight loss consultant, I can tell you one thing for sure. People like to talk about losing weight, they like to buy things to help them lose weight, but they don’t really like to lose weight. They like to nap and eat cheesy gorditas. Since I was, on average, at least fifteen pounds heavier than any of my clients, I was a very popular consultant. I made people feel better about themselves. I was the Good Cop. People who would usually have been nervous to step on the scale after a week of binging felt safe to do it in front of me. They knew I wouldn’t pistol-whip them with frozen entrées. Consequently, I had a very low drop-out rate. I rarely had to make the dreaded Reminder Calls.

    Sometimes, though, a manager would take us out of the loop and get all of the consultants to work on the list at once—a blitz of concentrated effort intended to whittle the list down as much as possible. One manager had the she-balls to call this drudgery a “Phone Party!” She’d spring it on us, bombshell-style. She’d practically skip through the beige-carpeted labyrinth of cubicles, singing, “Phone Party! Everyone meet in the conference room for a Phone Party!” The conference room table would be set up with a long line of phones, like a Jerry Lewis telethon. We’d each take a section of the dropout list and call as many people as we could in an hour. That was the “phone” part. The “party” part was a small bag of unsalted soy kernels. You had to bring your own Diet Coke.

    Our manager even tried to muster up a little friendly competition. A consultant would receive a tiny gold star sticker for each client she could get to book a make-up appointment. For a while, this got the phone lines burning. You see, we thought there might be a larger prize at the end of the hour for those with the most gold stickers. A coffee cup bearing a nondenominational inspirational message, or perhaps a sweetly scented votive candle. But no. No one quite knew what to do with these stickers, so each of us found our own way to use them. One memorable co-worker used hers to make glittery pastie-type circles on her sweater. I wore mine like jailhouse tears. The Ace Frehley of calorie coaches. Though I enjoyed my stint in dietary law enforcement, I went back to waiting tables because I’m better at encouraging people to live outside the food pyramid. You don’t get gold stars for bringing an extra bread basket to the table, but you get a more satisfying reward: tips.

  • Extreme Makeover

    Ask anyone who has gone through a breakup—the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Need a testimonial? Just ask the Star Tribune editorial board. Once upon a time, the Strib’s endorsement meant something. It was a player in Minnesota politics, an institution crossed at one’s peril.

    Not anymore. Minnesotans have rejected the Strib’s endorsed candidates with increasing frequency—Sharon Sayles Belton, Skip Humphrey, Roger Moe, Fritz Mondale, Patty Wetterling—the list grows with each election cycle.

    So what’s an editorial board to do?

    One strategy: Come up with a “big, bold plan” to reshape city government—which, if adopted, would make the Star Tribune editorial board a player again. The board has decided that Minneapolis city government is “inefficient, bloated, wasteful, arrogant, and hidebound.” In other words, it needs an extreme makeover. If Minneapolis would only follow “our preferences,” as the paper patronizingly wrote last December, then it could rekindle the ardor and respect of the state Legislature. The Legislature, mind you, is full of outstate politicians like Dick Day, the House Republican Majority Leader, who thinks, among other things, that Minneapolis schools “suck.”

    About those “preferences.” The Strib believes the City Council should shrink from thirteen members to six, four of whom would be elected citywide. The Strib would have the mayor appoint a city manager to run day-to-day business, and it would prohibit council members from speaking directly to city department heads and employees. Under the guise of “efficiency,” these proposals are anti-democratic and wildly out of sync with Minneapolis political culture.

    More than other major U.S. cities, Minneapolis is the land of “retail” politics, where politicians woo us and answer our phone calls. When gangster wannabes heaved a ten-pound rock through my window last summer, I was very glad I could call Fifth Ward council member and nearby neighbor Natalie Johnson Lee, who could intercede on my behalf with the cops and other city agencies.

    If the Strib had its way, Lee would have no choice but to direct me to the city manager’s office. This is not only inefficient and stupid, but clearly unconstitutional. How could a newspaper, presumably a First Amendment champion, advocate that our council members forfeit their free speech rights as a condition of their office?

    Beyond that, would an appointed city manager be as concerned about a rock through a North Side window as someone who actually lives in that neighborhood? Mayor R.T. Rybak doesn’t think so, and neither does the guy who wants his job, Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin. Rybak says the Strib proposal has some “interesting points,” but he questions whether Minneapolis needs a city manager; within the current system, he boasts, he has produced “five balanced budgets” and instituted major “developmental reform.” McLaughlin agrees that Minneapolitans would not accept an unelected bureaucrat running the city.

    Significantly, both Rybak and McLaughlin believe the Strib’s proposals would virtually wipe out African-American voting power. Rybak told me that “it is a well-known fact that the larger the district, the harder it is for minority members to get elected.”

    Beyond that, the Strib editorial board “prefers” that City Council members work part-time, with their salaries pegged at a fraction of that paid to the mayor. Apparently, they believe this is the best way to “recruit high-quality council members from the private sector’s professional ranks, including Republicans whose influence desperately is needed in city government.” A once staunchly DFL newspaper now calls for Republicans in city government. The Strib itself once upon a time railed against part-time council members because, it said, part-timers created inherent conflicts of interest and created a setup tailor-made for corruption.

    The Strib editorial board, with its misplaced fealty to the “private sector’s professional ranks”—the same people who brought us Enron and whose minions, such as conservative darling Tim Pawlenty, consider subsidized premiums for struggling Minnesotans “welfare” health care—must have ditched civics class in high school. Grass-roots democracy, the kind that Minneapolitans have come to expect, is by its very nature messy and, yes, sometimes inefficient, especially when compared to a business striving to produce the most widgets in a day. To the Strib’s apparent chagrin, true democracy is alive and well in the City of Lakes; it can thrive, however, only when all of its citizens have a chance to be heard.

  • Wine of the People

    The other day I had lunch with a lawyer. “Do you like Tony Blair?” he asked, with the courtesy characteristic of his profession. I could give no sensible answer, as I have never had the honor of the prime minister’s acquaintance.

    My learned friend went on to wonder how an apparently intelligent and sensitive man could get Britain involved in America’s current adventure in Iraq. It’s not as if the British public was spoiling for the fight. Perhaps Mr. Blair was genuinely frightened of the elusive weapons of mass destruction. There is certainly no shortage of members of Parliament who say they voted for the war because they were told Saddam Hussein could wipe us all out in forty-five minutes flat. Or could it simply be that Mr. Blair was afraid of compromising the special relationship between our two great countries?

    One key to understanding Tony Blair is religion—not the battling certainties that animate many evangelical supporters of President Bush, but an altogether more modern, more flexible faith. The Christianity to which his (and my) generation of literate Englishmen did (or did not) subscribe was characterized by a 1963 book called Honest to God. In it, a bishop explained that God is the Ground of All Being, not an old man with a beard in the sky, a truth which some of his readers had tumbled to already (surely the old man with the beard is Santa Claus). This up-to-date faith had much to say about society: “though we are many we are one bread, one body” ran the mantra in the Church of England’s grim modern-language liturgy. It warmed to personal intensity, while soft-pedaling private prayer. The hard work of metaphysics and theology took a back seat to building communities. Diplomacy, someone once said, is the art of letting other people have your way; Christian charity, as it was promoted to us in sixties England, often seemed to mean letting everyone else have their way.
    Of course it is good to encourage people to be kind, and one has to acknowledge the sincerity of a public school (i.e. private school) product like Tony Blair, who joins the British Labour party, the party of workers, with hand and brain, under the impression that he may help folk who lack the advantages he was born into.

    But this sort of well-meaning Christian pragmatism is dangerously eager to please. Hence the persistent efforts of the Blair press office to fool all of the people all of the time. Hence, too, a willingness to give in to whomever has shouted most loudly most recently (they call it inclusiveness). A fellow supporter of foxhunting said to me over Christmas that the only sure way to save our sport is to have George Bush come out in favor of it, because he is the only person who can shout louder than the left-wing tyrants of the Labour Party.

    For Mr. Blair and those like him are not Champagne socialists, eccentric noblemen with demotic principles, like Philippe Duc d’Orléans, who changed his name to Citoyen Égalité during the French Revolution (but was guillotined just the same). Such Bollinger Bolsheviks savor the sharp irony of their position; their taste for aristocratic pleasures is undimmed by their embracing the cause of the People.

    Such inconsistency is alien to the Blair Project. The characteristic drink of the contemporary British Christian Socialist is blander, more middle-class. It lacks fizz, and so would never lead to an amusing indiscretion like the nose trick (in which the victim unintentionally gargles champagne through the nose). It is also cheaper than bubbly and, in the spirit of inclusiveness, well within the financial reach of all. It is Chardonnay.

    The wine drunk at the celebration dinner after Mr. Blair’s general election victory was a Chardonnay from the village of Lugny near Macon in southern Burgundy, Macon-Lugny les Genièvres, shipped by Louis Latour and available for about $15. There is absolutely nothing nasty about this wine. The 2002 vintage that I enjoyed recently with an omelette lacked sharpness (unlike the same shipper’s Pouilly-Vinzelles, from the same part of Burgundy, available locally for about the same price). A thoroughly pleasant fruitiness gave way to firm, mild bitterness (a bit like the taste of orange pith), until, on swallowing, the fruit reasserted itself, lasting lingeringly. It was good. Decide for yourself if what is amiable in a wine is admirable in a politician.

  • Zodiac Maniacs

    Sometimes I read my horoscope and wonder if my fellow Geminis in the Sunni Triangle are “dressing for success today” and “playing it coy around that special Scorpio.” When you think about it, dressing for success might just as well mean body armor as a pair of Lucky jeans. And “coy” could be a euphemism for “remain indoors after curfew.”

    Once, back in Hazel Park Junior High, my study buddy Judy, who was convinced that our fates would be forever intertwined, passed me her dog-eared copy of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs under the desk in science class. It was a paperback as thick as a three-egg omelette, with the binding broken in the “Libra/Capricorn” chapter. That chapter foretold the marvelous life Judy could expect to start living once she began going out with the most popular boy in school. To be fair, the binding of this well-thumbed tome was also creased at the “Gemini/Aquarius” chapter, which highlighted what I could expect when I began going out with the friend of the most popular boy in school. Judy would also pass me long, speculative, dreamy notes. What the four of us would wear to prom, to our double wedding ceremony, and how we would live in houses next door to one another. BFFs forever. Yes, Sun Signs had it all worked out.

    Judy and I were roly-poly girls. We wore thick eyeglasses with plastic frames and ill-fitting clothes a season or two this side of stylish. Judy wrote out all of her class papers in dense, tiny, box-like characters that made every assignment she handed in look eerie and disturbed, like a furious ransom note. I was the type of girl who told disgusting jokes about bodily functions and laughed like a horse. I won’t try to kid you, I haven’t changed all that much. I didn’t need Ms. Linda Goodman to tell me our romantic futures. At slumber party séances, when I asked the Ouija board if I would get a date for the Snow Daze Dance, the plastic cursor would glide smoothly to no. Coincidence, or a warning from Captain Howdy?

    But even then, I understood the appeal of a horoscope. My tightly wound pal just wanted something, somewhere in the world, to make sense. Horoscopes offered a strange sort of hope. Because if every single personality trait, kink, and circumstance is written in the stars, then the notion of chance is snuffed out. If all people boil down to the sum of a mathematical equation, it erases the fear that humankind is just a random cell circus, tossed about in the big ol’ bingo hopper of life. Despite Ms. Goodman’s astonishing powers of prediction, I lost track of Judy once she made the college prep courses in ninth grade. Different crowds. (Have you ever gone to a Chess Club kegger?) Now I only check the horoscope once in a while, when I wonder what Judy’s up to.

    These days, a Sagittarian friend reads me her horoscope when many changes in her life are afoot. This woman always reads her newspaper fortunes to me with a quiet tone of finality, as if the die is cast and certain things can’t be helped. Because hey, if Mars moves into Capricorn and it stirs up the eighth house of transformation on casual Fridays, what exactly is there to be done about it? This same friend sleeps with her head at the foot of her bed whenever there is a full moon. I forget what mystical, Stevie Nicksian purpose this ritual serves, but I know she feels compelled to do it. Also, when she wants to sever contact with an annoying acquaintance, she writes the name down on a slip of paper and throws it into her crackling fireplace. Works every time. Well, it probably helps that she also stops returning their phone calls. This friend also lives in a South Minneapolis Tudor cottage constructed entirely of peppermint candy and sleeps with five cats. Just kidding. Except about the cats.

    I don’t mean to be a doubting Thomasina, but if the world’s events could really be charted and manipulated simply by being aware of one’s birth order and the lunar calendar, then I’m pretty sure the Renaissance Festival would operate year round, if you get my drift.

    The astrological wheel is confusing enough without bringing Chinese restaurant placemat soul animals into the mix. What am I, again? A monkey or twins? Twin monkeys? Well, that explains everything. Now give us a banana before we smear feces all over our cage and call you dirty names in sign language.

    As a longtime student of human behaviors (i.e. waitress), I’ve got to tell you, I’m more inclined these days to believe in a simple triumvirate to assign personality roles. I think people basically come in three types. Rock, paper, or scissors. Which are you?

  • Love It and Leave It

    African-American comedian Dave Chappelle has a recurring feature on his Comedy Central show, Chappelle’s Show, called “Ask a Black Dude.” During one segment, someone asked the Black Dude (aka Paul Mooney) why black men walk with a certain attitudinal swagger. Mooney responded that black men have a style that makes us the most imitated people on the planet, a style that tells the world that we are somebody, even if no one else hears or cares. Ironically, Mooney added, “Everyone wants to be a nigga, but nobody wants to be a nigga.”

    Mooney’s quip points to one of the most enduring conundrums of American history, one that becomes painfully clear every February during Black History Month: America’s passionate embrace of black culture and its simultaneous disdain for black people (particularly black men). During Black History Month (which, interestingly, occurs during the shortest month of the year), we get our token moments. And then, like an artificial Christmas tree, our history gets stowed away till next year, while our “yo”s and “wazzup”s continue to get imitated and co-opted, assimilated and mainstreamed.

    The truth is, ever since we got to this country, white people have exploited the way we walk, talk, sing, and dance. Our style, an amalgamation of African rhythms seasoned with our bittersweet and tumultuous New World experience, is vibrant, rebellious, funky, and edgy—in a word, cool. To take only the most obvious example: If there’s a reigning musical genre today, it would have to be hip-hop, which, besides its artistic value and innovations, is also blessed with legions of young white gangsta-wannabe fans. However, many of those same white hip-hop consumers know little or nothing about the history of the people who spawned the culture that created the hip-hop beat.

    Why does America continue to diss our history while devouring our culture? Because America’s founding fathers had to strip us of our history, and thus our collective humanity, in order to reconcile African slavery with their pronouncements that “all men are created equal.” Since we were “property,” our “owners” could freely exploit the things we produced. Should that “property” start to act like a “people,” with both a history and a future, then the whole corrupt system would collapse. Any threat to that system—such as a strong black male who could conceivably lead an uprising—had to be crushed. And today, despite the civil rights movement, affirmative action, and “diversity training,” we remain an object of fear and derision for most non-black Americans, who, despite their affinity for “nigga” culture, would never willingly trade places with us.

    Joseph, my eighteen-year-old eldest son, and I have had a running discussion about this phenomenon. Joseph’s biracial heritage has provided him with a Tiger Woods-like complexion that, by day, keeps white folks guessing. They thereby feel safer around him. By night, however, white people’s behavior leaves little doubt that they view him as a “soul brotha,” which is how he views himself.

    Joseph has learned firsthand that for many white Twin Citizens, black + male = threat. Recently, he had dropped off a friend late on a Saturday night in a well-to-do south Minneapolis neighborhood when a white cop drove up, shined a flashlight in his face, and yelled, “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” Joseph told me, “I thought about what you have always said—be very polite to the cops and do not argue with them. So I told him where I lived. But I knew I was being treated badly for nothing. So I politely asked him for his badge number. He muttered something under his breath and then sped off.”

    I have always counseled Joseph and his younger brother to not become paranoid about white people—after all, his mother and stepmother are white, as are many of his relatives and friends. And let’s be real—a disproportionate number of African-American men are involved in the kinds of activities that we all fear. Yet I fully understand and share my son’s ambivalence about being a “man of color” in a society that loves what “niggas” can do but has a hard time dealing with where we came from and who we are. Especially during Black History Month.

  • Wine for Poets

    Odd how few poets emerged from the Second World War. The First World War produced plenty. Some, like Rupert Brooke, thought they were going to be Homeric heroes––he died without hearing a shot fired in anger, and is buried on the island of Scyrus, where Achilles hid among the women. Others—Charles Sorley, Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon—tried to express the horror of the Western Front.

    But the only poet I know of from the Second War is Keith Douglas. He served in a cavalry regiment that had only recently exchanged its horses for tanks. He wondered at the unconcern of his brother-officers fighting in North Africa. It seemed that their hearts were not in the Libyan Desert, but galloping behind foxhounds in the Shires: “It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.” Foxhunting with hounds, the sport of “this gentle, obsolescent breed of heroes, unicorns almost,” is this month being banned by a new and ill-informed law rammed through a spiteful British Parliament by dubiously constitutional means. English country folk are furious—all sorts of people, not just Keith Douglas’s unicorns. The ban has nothing to do with guns; in fact, shooting will be the crueler, less effective alternative to hunting with hounds. Nor is it a matter of animal welfare; everyone agrees that foxes must be controlled by man in order to maintain the balance of nature. It has everything to do with urban disdain for the countryside and the realities of the natural world. How can you legislate against terriers digging or dogs chasing rabbits?

    The realities of nature are like tannin in red wine; too much is tiresome, but without them life is bland. Tannins are what give you the astringent taste in the middle of the mouthful. Until the early nineteenth century, there was thought to be only one type of tannin, the kind that can be extracted from the oak-apple, an unpalatable parasite of the oak tree, the size of a small brown Brussels sprout. In the Middle Ages, oak apples were used as an ingredient in the ink monks used to write manuscripts on parchment. Small boys would be sent round the hedgerows to gather the year’s supply in their frozen fingers. If you have ever sucked a fountain-pen nib (try anything once except adultery and Morris dancing!), you can imagine how bitter this tannin might be.

    In fact, different types of tannin are present in all sorts of emulsions of foliage. You can taste it in tea. No doubt there are tannins in the frothy tisane of autumn leaves that drifts on the surface of the Mississippi downstream from St. Anthony Falls after the snowmelt each year.

    There are pleasing tannins at the center of a very palatable red wine from the Rhone that I came across recently––I say palatable deliberately, because the tannins are most apparent when the tongue is rubbed against the roof of the mouth. This wine is the 2003 red Beaumes-de-Venise from Paul Jaboulet ainé (available locally for around fifteen dollars).

    Beaumes-de-Venise is a pretty, Provençal town famous mainly for its sweet white wine, made from the Muscat grape, Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise. Red Beaumes-de-Venise is made from Grenache and Syrah, the most popular grapes for red wine in the Rhône valley, and would go well with duck or goose or any red meat or powerful cheese. Indeed, I have seen it take on a haggis and win. (Wonderful thing, haggis––why do Americans not eat heart or liver or kidneys, especially kidneys?)

    Two-thousand-three was a hot summer in the south of France. While hordes of Parisians roared along narrow roads during les grandes vacances and English visitors went to view the place where Peter Mayle lived before his books made it too popular for him to continue to live there, while no doubt some wistful souls went to see the ruins they read of in the charming tales of Alphonse Daudet, the country’s grapes ripened rapidly. Sugars developed in the skins; the sharper acids were muted. The wine that resulted is intense and ripely redolent of soft fruit and alcohol, as well as having the aforementioned tannins at its center.

    Tannins ensure longevity. Drink a bottle now, and keep another for later, to see how the tannins mellow. This is intense enough to be wine for poets. One of the more eloquent Parliamentary defenders of foxhunting called her sport “our music, our poetry, our art.” There is certainly plenty of good hunting verse. God alone knows if any poet can make sense of the chaos that has been created in Mesopotamia by the politicians of our two great nations.

  • Ten Steps to Increased Anxiety!

    Hello, everyone. My name is Colleen and I am a women’s magazine addict. I am addicted not to Harper’s Bazaar, not to Vogue, but to the kind of women’s magazines that are displayed at the checkout lanes of your mid-range grocery store chains. It’s embarrassing, but it’s true. Whether I’m on the Stairmaster at the gym, or idling in the dentist’s waiting room, I hypnotically reach for the periodicals whose headlines promise to teach me how to “Organize My Life Once and for All!” and lose pounds fast on the grapefruit diet. You know—the types of magazines that feature Kelly Ripa on their covers. I’ve never seen the show she hosts, never heard her speak. But I know who she is. Because of women’s magazines, I know that Kelly Ripa has two high-profile jobs, a hunky Hispanic soap-star husband, and lots of children. And perfect skin.

    Never mind that I don’t really need to know any of this trivia; I read it anyway. And then I can’t find the delete button for it in my brain. Useful information, like basic math skills and cursive writing, seems to vanish, perhaps obliterated by the onslaught of Kelly Ripa Fun Facts. Until someone over at the Mayo Clinic invents a neurological defragmenter, I will stockpile celebrity minutiae in my brain, and I fear that on my deathbed, instead of remembering my own children’s names, I will recall only the names of famous peoples’ offspring. Gwyneth begat Apple.

    I now feel compelled to bring home at least one monthly cover image of Kelly Ripa with a turbo-fan flying mane of hair and a full-on, open-mouthed, manic rictus. (By the way, this type of smile, which celebrities have perfected, also happens to be a sign of aggression in chimpanzees. Keyword: Julia Roberts.) Never mind that I need this image like I need another hole in my head, or like I need its inevitable accompanying article, “Kelly Ripa’s Energy Makeover!” I know from direct personal experience in the glamorous world of show business that numerous celebrities derive their get-up-and-go from a glass pipe. Despite all of this, I feel powerless to stop reading, drop, and roll the hell out of the store without purchasing two or even three of these dirty little lifestyle rags. Yes, I do buy newsstand copies, furtively. If I subscribed to these magazines and the letter carrier knew my secret shame, I would expire of complications stemming from acute embarrassment.

    I wish I could figure it out. It’s not like the magazines help or comfort me in any way. Despite repeated warnings from Good Housekeeping to “Get Started Now!” I remain a terrible procrastinator. The most cynical of all is Family Circle, which employs the double-whammy approach when putting together those hard-to-resist covers. Family Circle covers always have a mouthwatering picture of seasonal baked goods tumbling in artful abundance off dessert trays. A recent one features rich cream filling oozing out of a petit four that has been split in half—right next to a coverline, “Walk Ten Pounds Off In Ten Days!” But what really frosts my tips are the self-help articles. Talk about poisoning the well. Back in December, I read “Dr. Phil’s Family Sanity Guide for the Holidays.” I came home from Christmas dinner convinced that my family is but a Whitman’s Sampler of psychological afflictions. I used to think we were just colorful.

    Flipping through them at the newsstand, I suspect that these magazines are actually mocking me and the other women who buy them. I think they’re edited by loveless, style-obsessed spinsters in New York City who don’t have families because they couldn’t fit them into their studio apartments. Instead they smoke and watch reruns of Sex and the City. I imagine them sucking down lychee martinis while brainstorming folksy, homespun articles designed to humiliate me. “Make Monogamy Sizzle!” Ha, ha, ha. Then they throw up lunch and go buy shoes.

    I wonder if Kelly Ripa knows that her day in the media’s hot sun will end. Because these things are cyclical. Really, I wish Kelly Ripa no ill, for I feel I have come to know her. I wish her safe passage to the land of former women’s magazine cover girls. Marilu Henner, Lynda Carter, Marie Osmond. Pricilla Barnes, Vicki Lawrence, Dinah Shore. One day soon Kelly Ripa will join the ranks of these bygone celebrity Everywomen, who were recognizable and pretty, but not too sexy. Until then, may her beautiful countenance smile upon us from the magazine rack, a beatific, if disposable, Madonna extolling the virtues of low-impact aerobics, slow-cooker meals, and “Goof-Proof Eyes, Lips, and Hair!”

  • The Other Kind of Outing

    Behind every news exposé, be it sporty (Barry Bonds and steroids), vengeful (outing CIA operative Valerie Plame), or just plain titillating (those tidbits about Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress), there is almost always a confidential source. Without confidential sources (and the reporters who love them), Watergate would simply refer to an upscale Washington hotel and C.J. would be out of a job.

    News sources, as well as their close siblings, whistleblowers, understand all too well that the only difference between being a confidential source and an unmasked source is the reporter’s promise to keep their identity a secret. It’s purely a matter of trust, with no legal recourse should a reporter, sensing that someone might have to take a bullet for the team, renege on his promise and reveal his source. Or he might simply decide that the name of the source should be part of the story. In either case, the source can do nothing but suck it up.

    That is, until Dan Cohen, author of the soon-to-be-published Anonymous Source, successfully sued the local dailies for outing him as the confidential source of political dirt that effectively ended the career of one high-profile politician, and tarnished the reputation of another. Cohen was the Minneapolis City Council president back in the late sixties, when Republicans actually got elected to office in Minneapolis. After briefly helping to run the Peace Corps during the Nixon administration, and making failed bids for Minneapolis mayor and county commissioner, Cohen settled into the advertising business. He also remained a loyal foot soldier for Republican candidates.

    In 1982, he was carrying water for Republican gubernatorial candidate Wheelock Whitney, who, less than two weeks before the election, was trailing the ultimately victorious Rudy Perpich by twenty points. Cohen, hoping for one of those October miracles, volunteered to make public copies of police records that showed Perpich running mate Marlene Johnson had a shoplifting conviction. He took the information to the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press.

    Before Cohen gave up the goods, he secured promises of anonymity from both papers. The dailies ran the story next day—with Cohen’s name and picture. Soon thereafter, the Star Tribune ran a cartoon depicting him crawling out of a garbage can, and Cohen lost his ad agency job. When he managed to get a small advertising gig with the University of Minnesota, Strib columnist Doug Grow self-righteously castigated the U of M for consorting with a bottom feeder like Cohen.

    Within weeks, Cohen was virtually unemployable. He was broke, and a political pariah to boot. With his back to the wall, Cohen believed he had nothing to lose by, in his words, “suing the bastards.”

    All the legal wrangling aside, wasn’t what Cohen did—leaking an opponent’s ancient shoplifting conviction days before an election—well, dirty politics? Cohen had a ready answer. “On reflection, I admit that it was mean and if I had to do it all over, I probably would not do it. However, it was not dirty. I gave the newspapers truthful information about a candidate’s criminal history. Before I ran for county commissioner I got arrested for scalping Kentucky Derby tickets. I wrote a humorous column about it so the voters knew. I got my butt handed to me in the following election, but everything was out there. I did not lie to or conceal anything from anyone. Playing dirty is when you promise to protect someone and then you rat them out.”

    So many years later, why should people care about Cohen’s story? He had an answer for that as well. “The media is all over Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd’s Free Speech Protection Act of 2004, which will give reporters federal protection for refusing to reveal their confidential sources. I am not opposed to that, but they have protection. Reporters have big media on their side. Guys like me, we are totally on our own. If the media decides to burn us, as they did me, we burn—humiliated and totally abandoned to our fates.”

    Dan Cohen may not be the most sympathetic figure in the world, but he does have a point. Let’s face it: People in power are usually not going to voluntarily reveal damaging information. And even though there are some courageous people who have the cojones to publicly reveal what they know—Jeffrey Wigand, who blew the whistle on Big Tobacco, and FBI agent Coleen Rowley come to mind—most of us will only do so under the cloak of anonymity. We need to know that if anyone is going to take a bullet for our truthful whispers in the shadows, it will not be us.

  • R. S. V. P.

    Wagner’s music, so they say, is not as bad as it sounds. I suppose the tunes aren’t too awful if you don’t mind being shouted at. But what makes me queasy is the overwhelming moral effect, the way it makes you limp and inert like a rabbit trapped in headlights.

    Other composers in the light and tuneful category make you want to do something. Gilbert and Sullivan tickle you into singing along; the Strauss waltzes (Johann’s, not Richard’s) offer an invitation to trip the light fantastic toe; a Sousa march is meant to make you, well, march. Even the deafening stuff enjoyed by my teenage daughter (somewhere between a Hard Rock and a hard place) makes one apparently want to crowd-surf—which sounds like a lot of fun.

    But hearing Wagner (one can hardly call it listening) merely makes you swoon. It is a passive activity, as squared-eyed as goggling at a television. Slot the CD into the brain, switch off the critical faculty, and let the waves of emotion submerge the pleasure centers, no matter if the torrid tide carries you ineluctably toward a Liebestod. This is consumer music.

    Am I being unfair? I expect so. But being on the receiving end of Wagner reminds me of a bean-counter university official I met years ago who wanted the professors to refer to their students as “customers.” Apparently, in the retail chain where he had been previously employed, there was no term of greater respect.

    But there is a difference between teaching and hawking burgers (yes, I have done both). In retail, the customer gets what you sell him. In education you can never be sure that those who are listening are hearing the same things that the professor says. Nor should they be. A lecturer looking out at ten dozen eyes sees at least ten dozen things going on dialectically behind them—“one deep calling to another,” Augustine thought as he gazed out at his congregation. It may be necessary for the pyre to be built in one place so that the fire from heaven can come down on another. Possibly, virtue can be taught, but it is an oblique business, requiring contributions from all those sitting on the log.

    Wine works the same way. Of course one can drink to induce oblivion. But aside from the legendary potion opened in error by Tristan and Isolde, which allegedly smote them with their inescapable love (infatuation, more like it), I can think of no beverage that automatically induces any interesting or enduring state of mind. Enjoying wine involves an active response on the part of the drinker. The counterpoint of great claret may not require as much digital dexterity as a Bach fugue, but it calls for every bit as much sensual attention.

    The wine I have found for this month lacks the complexity of the great reds of Bordeaux, but it certainly bears the message répondez s’il vous plaît, even if the response is only copious salivation. It is the 2003 vintage of a white wine called Txakoli, made at a bodega called Txomin Etxaniz, which is near the town of Guetaria on the south shore of the Bay of Biscay in northern Spain’s Basque country.

    You can get it locally for around $18, and once you know the “tx” is pronounced approximately like the English “ch,” you will have no problem asking for it. The name is, naturally, Basque, and Basque is the oldest living language in Europe, quite distinct in structure from the Indo-European languages of the rest of the continent, and dating back to the millennia before hordes made their way west from the steppes of Central Asia, speaking the languages that were the ancestors of Hittite, Persian, Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Welsh, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh, and all. The grapes are also peculiar to the Basque country, mostly Hondarribi zuri (white) with some Hondarribi beltza (black).

    Pull the cork from the tall green bottle, pour out the clear pale contents, and taste. There is a tiny tingle on the tongue, as if you had sand in your sandwich, though without the annoyance that would arouse. Then a refreshing flavor and a slight smokiness, followed by a taste, accumulating on the palate the more one sips, of Granny Smith apples. This is pleasantly sharp. Plenty of the natural malic acid (from “malum,” Latin for apple) remains, as it has not all been transformed into the blander, buttery-tasting lactic acid.

    Should you wish to orchestrate Txakoli with food, you might try the things that go with apples—pork, for instance, and cheese (in Yorkshire they eat cheddar cheese with apple pie, most un-American). For music, try Messiaen: bright dissonance, energy, and acid. May it give you joie et clarté.

  • The Game of Life

    My son Isaac and I were playing Scrabble at our dining room table one recent evening when the phone rang. As always, Isaac ran to answer it. He heard his sixteen-year-old sister’s voice on the other end of the line. She was calling from her father’s house in St. Paul. When he heard that she wanted to talk to me, like any thirteen-year-old little brother, he made her wait.

    “What do you want to talk to mom for?”

    “Give her the phone, Isaac! I have to talk to her now!”

    I was sitting across the table, silent yet hearing everything, watching this scene go down. As always, I was conflicted. How far do I let them take the battle before I step in and pull rank? And how much longer will I be able to? It’s a nasty fact of parenting teenagers that as each day passes, your Dr. Spock death grip loosens. Edicts become suggestions, proclamations become proposals.

    I came out of my misty reverie to realize that a couple of minutes had passed and Isaac was still holding the receiver tight to his ear. He had launched into tactical taunting, repeating everything his sister said in a creepy, quiet, old-lady voice.

    The louder she got, the quieter his whispering became.

    “ISAAC! Give mom the phone NOW!”

    “Isaac, give mom the phone now … hehehe.”

    “ISAAC!”

    “Eye-zz … ack … hehehe.”

    I let this foolishness go on another minute until my daughter had resorted to yelling and my son had begun barking in response to her, like a dog who’d mistakenly knocked the receiver off the hook. This brings new meaning to family game night, yes?

    I wrested the phone from the boy, who dissolved into giggles, then dug his hand into the letter sack for more tiles. My daughter was frantic. Her dad is a cabinetmaker with a home workshop and something had gone very wrong.

    One of the most horrible aspects of horrible accidents is that you never know just when they are about to be rained down upon you, or someone you love. The overwhelming sense of bewilderment mixes with fear and pain, and the surprise factor shakes it all up like a fizzy panic cocktail.
    “Honey—what’s going on?”

    “Mom there’s been an accident and Dad cut his hand bad in the table saw and we’re at the emergency room and I don’t know but I think he lost a finger or two and he drove to the hospital with his hurt hand wrapped in a towel and I’m worried about him and they’ve got him back there now but I saw a lot of blood!”

    She calmed down long enough to answer the where, what, and how questions accurately. After we devised a plan of action, I debriefed Isaac, who was mortified at his phone antics in light of this new information. I assured him that with his heartfelt apology, his sister would forgive him.

    Then I used his remorse as a teaching moment to stress the importance of telephone etiquette.

    Then I used his remorse to get him to take out the garbage.

    With nothing to do but wait for the next phone call from the emergency room, we sat at the table and continued our game in thoughtful quiet. Isaac, no doubt reflecting on the disturbing events of the evening. Me, contemplating the absurd notion of control.

    In a sober tone, Isaac broke the silence. “Hey mom, you don’t think Steve lost his thumb, do you?”

    “Gosh, hon, I don’t know. I hope not. That would be awful.”

    Isaac’s brow furrowed as he looked at me across the game board and said, in all seriousness, “Yeah. Because you know, that’s the only thing that separates us from the animals.”

    Maybe it was suppressed hysteria breaking through, but I howled with laughter. Still, it did get me thinking later that night, on my way to the hospital, about what does separate us from the animals.

    I’d like to say that it’s passion, but anyone who’s seen a dog dig after a bone knows better. And it can’t be art, because if you’ve ever witnessed the lace of a spider web in the morning sunlight, you know there’s way too much incidental beauty on this Earth for us to take special credit for what we create. It can’t be politics, because lions have prides, and hives have monarchies.

    And so it must be power tools.