So goes Ferraro, so goes the Derek...

I don’t normally take my cues from Geraldine Ferraro, but she’s right about one thing, coerced or otherwise – it’s about time to quit this race for the Democratic nomination. Sure, she’s not actually running for anything, and she’s still technically a Clinton booster. And I don’t doubt that she, in her peculiarly oxymoronic way, is somehow rallying racist feminists against the candidacy of Barack Obama.

But even so, she’s declared herself a non-participant for the remainder of this year’s contest, content, it seems, with her trivial status as a female First (vice-presidential nominee, 1984), asterisk pending. There’s wisdom in her departure, and I’m determined, after watching countless candidates and loose-lipped advisors flee the trail, to no personal avail, finally to take note.

After all, I’ve followed the ’08 campaign like a scavenger tailing naked seagulls into a glowing post-apocalyptic landfill. From the initial shocks of the Iowa caucuses to Obama’s latest blowout in Mississippi, I’ve hung on the every word of myriad prognosticators, seers, strategists, shills, and misanthropes (yep, Fox News), desperate for twelfth, thirtieth, and fifty-seventh opinions on the state of this year’s race. By now I’ve pretty much outsourced my mind to the gasbag class and I’m wondering, somewhat nostalgically, if I’ll ever get it back.

In January, though, I was a concerned citizen struggling to choose among of the abortion-loving seekers of the Democratic nomination. I studied their positions seriously, convinced that there were actually differences between them; the mainstream media were surprisingly helpful even, providing what seemed to be useful contrasts to a man who’d dozed through the run-up to Iowa. I quickly discovered, however, that the leading candidates were, respectively, female and black. And they both thought George Bush was stupid, plus his stupid war and tax cuts.

Sure, there were slight gaps in their approaches to health care, trade, diplomacy, and those blasted special interests, but such contrasts amount merely to shades of blue, not unlike the electoral map late on the night of Super Tuesday. Do you prefer your change in royal blue or navy, with accents of white hot rhetorical fire versus an experienced hand doused in policy expertise? Supporters of this candidate or that will maintain there are serious differences between them, which is fine until you consider that a Democratic Congress is likely to homogenize whatever proposals it receives. It’s as if I’d learned all I needed to know about voting in the brutish caste system of the high school cafeteria.

There’s much in our political and economic culture which encourages this view. Ideas are important, but secondary to the ability to project a winning, salable image. Something we can easily understand. New versus old, black and white, man against woman. Geraldine Ferraro, and the opinion-mongers who trade in revisionist thought, shout to define the debate, and the candidates, with their talking heads in tow, happily participate. And so is the public, at that space where marketing, entertainment, and politics collide, where consumption trumps creativity and introspection, and, ultimately, reason.

Ordinarily, I have few qualms with these phenomena. It’s America as its surreal yet somehow authentic self. But are we selecting a tube of toothpaste here or the Democratic candidate for president?

The constant drum-beating, with assertion and counter-claim as news – just listen to Obama’s campaign manager, on his daily conference call, whine about Clinton’s shifting definition of “winning” – serves simply to confuse the public. Or at least me anyway. I’ve found, in my search for useful insights, a diverse array of views and commentary on television, in the papers, and on the web, yet little which crystallizes the race for me one way or the other.

The voices all blend together, challenging me to take sides on the sole basis of my gut instinct. It seems so uncivilized. I suppose the primeval high will dissipate once, if ever, we reach the general election, as there are inarguable differences between the two major parties that simply don’t exist in Donkeyland. But I’m convinced that, even then, the attacks between left and right – versus left and lefter – will leave us with quite the intellectual hangover. It’s what happens when you presume that political opponents, solely on the basis of their contrariness, hold equally valid views. To presume otherwise brooks arrogance, but it also obscures the elusive truth.

So maybe Geraldine is on to something. Perhaps a break from the process, a retreat into my own mind, will provide the clarity, or at least comfort, that I seek. Maybe the only truths that really matter are my own, and it’s okay to support Obama on squishy lessons of the high school cafeteria. It’s a little primitive, but it ain’t exactly race-baiting either.

Gen-Xers try parenting...

Nugget from this evening, as Team America: World Police blares within ear-, if not eyeshot, of a four-year-old protesting her parents' prohibition against viewing the dicks/pussies/assholes scene: "Hey; this is ok! I can hear what they're saying, but not see anything!"

Colour is to color, as scone is to...?

I've got to hand it to Starbucks. Now that their transformation of America's coffee culture is complete - whatever happened to those middle aged zombies sipping (there wasn't gulping in those days) watery, "instant" coffees from eight ounce styrofoam cups? - they're taking on the pastry establishment. This startling movement, mind you, comes on the heels of their broadside against the music industry and threatens to double, if not quintuple, the mass of soft tissue straining our slow but steady advance to the nearest emergency room. Yes, fair reader, what you've heard is absolutely true - those clever fuckers have reinvented the scone.

Gone are the rock-hard wedges of crumbly - what... cake? cookie? - beloved by generations of contemplative tea drinkers, replaced with cylindrical treats dappled with decorative icing and packed throughout with high-sugar flavor crystals. They're an abomination, these new scones, a smack to centuries of tradition, so deviant I question whether they can, in fact, be called scones.

Just last night, I tried a chocolate "scone," which, to pre-empt accusations of blandness, had been injected with a thick, caramel-ly paste. The paste - a near-cousin to dulce de leche, if not actually dulce de leche, by my taste buds - complemented the swarm of chocolate morsels strewn unevenly over the surface, providing ample opportunity for instantaneous tooth decay. (The Starbucksians, per the usual, were hedging their bets.) The dulce - on top of the iced drizzle and chocolate chunk avalanche, and the syrups no doubt lurking elsewhere - guaranteed a food orgasm, but also lent an air of ridiculous overkill known well to late-night television addicts.

Delicious? Absolutely. And pretty much what I expected a scone to be when, years earlier, I first bit into one. But there's little to link these confections to their stoic forebears, those ever dry triangles of continental pragmatism. It's akin to suggesting an American is a Brit or, even worse, English - perhaps with its next update, Starbucks will put is marketing might behind a rewrite of the pastry catalog. Scones? How 'bout "caries?"

Aborted zygote of thought...

A couple of years ago, I, with my friend Jesse, visited Sin City for three days of lewd and reckless fun. This ambition astonished both our close friends and acquaintances, as we were the eldest sons of dutiful American families, bred to avoid misfortune and STDs in particular. Yes, our lethargic movements pretty much said it all: not much past thirty, we'd been reduced to beaten down office types, incapable of embracing work-life or, for that matter, uttering "I quit."

Yet there we were, by the pool at the off-Strip Tuscany Suites, adopting the steely airs of cigar-chomping Generalissimo Vegas, spitting on the tender lessons of our youth. To hell with Mother and her plaintive appeals! Must we all remain virgins until the law allows abortion without parental consent? After years of quiet suffering, it was time the world finally knew the truth about us, consequences be damned: WE WERE NOT NERDS... (or virgins).

Don't mess with Fulton!

Sandy, my friend of maddeningly indeterminate status, remembers everything. Well, not quite everything, but definitely everything I say. Her near-total recall, were it known beyond the ten “lifers” she deigns to call friend, would no doubt flummox both Congressional investigative bodies and Alberto Gonzales alike. It’s a truly uncanny ability; no commentary, ranging from the heart-felt to the throw-away, escapes the viscous webbing reserved for this or that loved one (or nemesis), each of whom is cataloged with equal rigor if not aplomb.

Simply speaking with Sandy requires the valor of one thousand men, ten thousand in August, and the brains of a wily bacterium nonplussed by modern pharmaceuticals. The task is especially challenging for those enamored with sweeping absolutes – “I don’t like music,” for example, when “I don’t care for this song” would quite make do. And thus the broadside goes into the lock box, bookmarked for split-second retrieval like a favorite destination for soft-core porn.

Upset your invite to The White Stripes concert went to someone else? Well, check out this retort filed under Hyperbole as Monolithic Fact: “Sorry man – I thought you didn’t like music.”

While it’s possible this remark is simply snide regurgitation, the manner in which it’s delivered – deadpan, knowingly ironic yet thoroughly baffled – suggests the quaint notion that, among friends (or more?) at least, Rule 1 is to express yourself openly in the first place.

I suppose I could blame society-at-large for my failure in this respect. What am I, really, against the shock jocks, agri-businessmen, ward-heelers, and, depressingly, those dissembling “managers” down the hall? Entire industries, after all, exist solely to frame debates, create truth, and manufacture that narcotic of America’s talking class, Conventional Wisdom. What’s it matter what I think now – or more pointedly, what I say – versus tomorrow or next month? Until Sandy, I'd forgotten anyone was listening.

Of course, I’d long been aware of the “potential listeners” in my life, starting with Mom and her quiet search for evidence of a steady girlfriend. (It’s part of a mom’s job, I guess, to be ever hopeful.) And then there’s my boss, always plumbing for signs of ambition, or at least something unlike apathy; Christian friends, sussing for sprigs of religious revival; panhandlers, converting the hallmarks of guilt-ravaged yuppies – limp inflection and third grade diction – into winning appeals for pocket change.

And what of my friends? It's not as though they're self-involved pariahs, aged versions of those tart-y types from Laguna Beach; quite the opposite, actually. So what then? Well, if I'm left feeling that I don't know my friends, and am fearful that they don't exactly know me, I must reserve a heaping share of the blame for myself. For too long, my conversations have served mainly as a means to entertain – sometimes my audience, always myself – existing for the spirited dissection of topics ranging from Dick Cheney’s power-stent to pedophilia as mere recreation.

Lots of laughs, and not a little conflict, have ensued, but in angling for the next guffaw or gotcha – endlessly – I’ve stifled much of the substance I have to offer, and much worse: I haven’t bothered to store basic facts about the many people I care deeply about. I love their faces, their smiles, and those elusive intangibles, yet I can’t remember what they studied in college or where they grew up. Too boring, I’d thought, not realizing, fully, that the details make the person; the rest is just top hats and stiletto heels.

And so my punchlines and idle sentiments have been committed to Sandy’s memory, and embarrassingly, I can’t say the same in reverse. (Feel free to substitute Communist theory and Watchmen for the ha-ha vacuity of DHillz.) She doesn’t take me seriously, and, sometimes, I wonder if I shouldn’t either.

I must do better.

Hot as Hell? Spend spend spend!

The AccuWeather guys are at it again, trumpeting, in this summer of drought, not just Doppler radar but also the latest in their arsenal of meteorological half-truths, the "feels-like" temperature. This figure assigns "bonus degrees" to the day's standard reading using variables - humidity, pollution, Bill O'Reilly's speaking schedule - thought to impact the heat perceived by hapless pedestrians. The effect? Temperature inflation unknown since America, citing hygiene, rejected the sultry yet logical coos of the Celsius scale.

What started out as a menacing harbinger of global warming - remember the Heat Index, and the inflamed solar icons of the '90s? - has withered into a kindly response to a dowager's oft-repeated inquiry: "I said it feels like 103 out there! Care for another cigarette?" This multiplier, having had its fun with befuddled centenarians, is now bearing down on the one-time slackers of Generation X, altering behavior in the predicable fashion only The Man himself can truly appreciate.

Corporate drones announce, to all passersby, that work will continue, uninterrupted, at their desks throughout the lunch hour; would-be marathoners postpone training and concentrate on the ideal make-up of their fantasy football teams; and, most unsettlingly, posses of perpetually single yuppies, cosseted by the womb-like glow of recessed lighting, abandon long-planned outings to exploit massive summer-end sales. OK, OK, so maybe the doused, spent look of a sun-stroked picnicker won't exactly propel the G-movie nice guy to XXX-nirvana. But why must our experiences, or rather our conception of what our experiences will be, dictate so much of what we do - or don't do - in year seven of the War on Terror?

I'm not suggesting that anyone should enjoy wallowing in his own sweat - except, I have to say, those paunchy newshounds idling in the locker-room - but I fear that, far too often, I've been unduly influenced by the previews and predictions spouted with papal infallibility by the "experts" in this or that field, or even their lay counterparts. If it's August, the weatherman, with sledgehammer subtlety, dismisses your every intention: why bother with an outdoor movie screening, he suggests, when it feels like 100 degrees out there? Several of my friends bowed to the implication just last week, bailing on All the King's Men on reports of a marauding heat wave.

(Kudos to Sandy, and her gang of wine-swilling comrades - and I do mean comrades - for staring down the swelter. Youthful pluck, once again, prevails over aged discretion...)

They missed out on a lovely evening; a cool breeze funneled between the buildings of the national Mall, driving away the mosquitoes and humidity, and revealing the maximum starlight possible under Code Orange conditions. Now I trust that they enjoyed themselves, pampered with the joint pleasures of The Simpsons and climate control at the local cineplex, and I don't doubt the experience went exactly as anticipated. But I wonder if in forming judgments about what we expect to happen, and in planning as if those expectations are in some way guaranteed, we aren't denying ourselves the little surprises that The Man hasn't - yet - figured out how to monetize.

As for me, I'm staying clear of the weather report...

Save the world! Listen to live music!

I don't know who decided this, but it seems that live music is alone capable of raising awareness of humanity's down-trodden castes and hopeless causes, not to mention providing the outlet essential for expressing solidarity with unfortunates benighted by an incompetent public relations strategy. This is not to dismiss the generally low-profile yet high-impact efforts of liberal foils everywhere, who have expertly used the broad swath of modern government and media tools to transform our once progressive nation into a rights-optional enclave, but there's something confounding about concerts as geo-political watersheds.

I'm thinking mostly of those outdoor "Festivals," so named in hope the implied carnival atmosphere will in some small way mitigate the manifold displeasures and expense of actually being there. (At Virgin Fest in Baltimore last weekend, for example, the "Shade Tents," surrounded as they were with chain link fences (topped with, was it, razor wire?), seemed like deportation zones worthy of Shindler's List.) There was Live Aid and Farm Aid, then the Tibetan Freedom gig (benefiting whom?), and recently the Live Earth extravaganza, at which, according to my buddy, Chris, Billy Corgan asked viewers to stop stealing his music. And this past weekend, also at Virgin Fest, there was a small booth among dozens of others decrying the well-documented situation in Darfur. Music as lament, salve, and defiant bluster - does it offer anything more than a good, sun-scorched time?

While I don't doubt these efforts - particularly the over-the-top affairs fashioned according to the Bob Geldof template - do in some way raise the profile of those suffering needlessly (oddly, all of us in the case of Gore-fest), not to mention lots of cash that might not have otherwise been available, it seems the long- and even medium-term impact of these events is negligible. We focus for a day - or less - on the plight of this week's cause celebre, plaintively wailing to the rhythms of popular artists and chanting pre-fab slogans supporting goals best-suited for an alternative universe, and have a killer time doing it. They're worthy goals, surely, but the fact there's an event trumpeting them in the first place underscores the stark, chilling reality - our governments, and the vast majority of people who support them, simply do not care enough, if at all, about the fate of starving Africans, bankrupt farmers, and those long-forgotten Tibetans.

The music industry, by the time it marshals its stalwart iconoclasts and top-selling acts and embraces all things missionary (presumably, one hopes, excepting sex), has little hope to shape the debate beyond channeling the school-yard maxims of another era, when right was right and wrong was so terribly, inconceivably wrong. I suppose it's why we attend these galas, and shout along to standards channeling the full range of human emotion, to recall, in pure black and white, the justice and ideals to which we profess fidelity. It cleanses our sense of self, if not the Earth, and separates us from the cruel devices of humankind.

Otherwise, these concerts are just an excuse to party, like Arbor Day to a frat boy eyeing another bender. Here's hoping it isn't so...