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Come Poop With Me

Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Triumph the Insult Comic is something to be listened to if only to hear the librarian-mannered hostess saying the phrase "Come Poop with Me" several times over. That’s the name of the foul-mouthed puppet dog’s new Vaudville-esque CD and DVD in which he apparently raps, sings, and does phony phone calls.

Other highlights of the interview include revelations about how the whole Eminem drama at the MTV awards unfolded and Robert Smigel’s in character tongue in cheek mockery of Bill O’Reilly on Fresh Air (when he stormed off like a sap).

Angel in the Wings

Tony Kushner is regarded as one of the most humanistic and imaginative playwrights in American theatrer today. His decade-old play Angels in America will supposedly make the Reagan mini-series that CBS gutlessly yanked off the air look more like a TV homage worthy of the Reagan Legacy Project when it airs on HBO this December. A recent Mother Jones interview reveals some of his insights on culture, as well as his newly-found pragmatism towards American politics.

I have said this before, and I’ll say it again: Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country’s future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs — if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate — don’t give him your vote. Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

Script Runner

Wired online has a rather in-depth article detailing everything you ever wanted to know about Phillp K. Dick, the science fiction writer who wrote the brilliantly postmodern film Blade Runner among other mind-bending stories such as the ones adapted in Total Recall and The Minority Report — all decades before his work ever made it to Hollywood.

At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn’t really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a nerve. "People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream

Political Psyche Bites

This interview with Bill Clinton at The American Prospect not only reminded me that a president can communicate intelligently beyond a pre-written sound bite, it reveals an understanding of the liberal/conservative pyschology itself.

MICHAEL TOMASKY: [...] I’ve been reading lately some scholars who talk about conservatism and liberalism not only as ideologies but as psychological belief systems. [...] It says basically [that] conservatives believe in authority, they do see things in black and white, and that makes it easier for them to get their message out — it’s stark, it’s more reducible to the five-second sound bite. Liberals tend to see more nuance, tend to be more skeptical of authority, and it makes it harder, especially in this media climate, to get the message out.

BILL CLINTON: I think that’s right. And I think the psychological setting after 9-11 helped them. Because we all wanted to see things in black and white for a while. A grievous thing had been done to us, and we wanted to stand united against it.

But we think there are some things that are not open to debate. One is the historic mission of America, to form a more perfect union. What does that mean? It means widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the meaning of freedom and strengthening the bonds of community. And we feel passionately about that. We feel just as strongly as the Republicans do.

And we are not gonna demonize them the way they demonize us. We will never have the talk-show people saying things about them without regard to whether they’re true or not. That’s not who we are. But we do show up to fight. We think you’re worth fighting for. We think your future’s worth fighting for. And we need to use the rhetoric of passion, commitment and combat on behalf of ordinary people without ever slipping into the kind of vicious, personal, evidence-free — to use my wife’s phrase — assaults that they’re so good at.

We don’t have to do that. And it doesn’t really sell all that well with our crowd. But people have to believe that we wake up in the morning just as passionately committed to what we believe as they are. And in the process of conducting ourselves in that way, people get the sense intuitively that we’re strong enough to defend the country.

This is a contact sport. They’re supposed to try to beat us. Now, they do things by and large that we don’t think are legitimate. And lord knows they did while I was president.

Are You a Neocon?

Phew, for a minute I was worried I might be a neoconservative.

This 10 question quiz tells me, though, that I fall under the classification of… (are you ready for this one?)… liberal.

Shocker, I know.

But it does bring up an interesting point.  Are neoconservatives self-describing neoconservatives or do they actually have to take a test to come to that realization? Maybe they’re just running around thinking of themselves as "fair and balanced" independents for no good reason.

Subquestion: Shouldn’t there be a listing for "terrorist asshole" too? I’d think if you didn’t know you fell into that camp, you’d want to know before your next suicide bombing.

Anyway, food for thought.