I was lucky enough to meet him, and to host him on our show, and to talk with him, though all that was many years ago. From what I am told, during these last years, he was tired, and deaf, and worn, and ready to go. Still, though, Chicago just lost its heart.
I only have one Studs story. I offer it in the manner of tossing a daisy onto a huge pile of bouquets:
Back in 1998, when I first arrived in Chicago, WBEZ offered Studs a chance to continue doing interviews, after his long partnership with WFMT came to an end. I made a point of coming down to watch from the control room, as he was 86, and who knew when the day would come when he would have to stop.
On this day, he was interviewing Howard Lyman, the former Texas cattle rancher turned healthy food advocate, who had been Oprah Winfrey’s co-defendant in a spurious lawsuit filed by the Texas beef interests. The case had just been dismissed.
“So, Howard, what you been up to?” shouted Studs. He was going deaf, and like a lot of such people, spoke loudly.
“Well, Studs, I’ve been spending a lot of time down in Texas, with Oprah,” said Lyman.
I looked at my friend Tish who was producing the interview, and we both looked down. Like I said, Studs was 86, and not quite the man he had once been. I could see Lyman, through the glass, and he leaned forward, in a kind way, to speak to Studs.
“You know, Studs…” he said gently. “Oprah Winfrey.”
“Oh sure, Oprah Winfrey!” said Studs, suddenly certain, suddenly smiling. “Ya see, I used to know an Oprah Levine.”
Given my enthusiasm for the subject, you can imagine my delight when I checked in on the Corner last night and found that the latest “proof”that Obama, once elected, will bestow upon himself title Chairman of the Supreme American Soviet and seize all your JuJuBees is an interview conducted by my dear friend Gretchen Helfrich, on her late, much lamented Chicago Public Radio show, Odyssey. If you’re interested, you can hear all of Obama’s appearances on the radio station, here.
By the way, on at least one of those occasions, I happened to be walking down the hall and saw him about ten feet to my left. I knew who he was, as he was my brother’s State Senator. I was tempted to say hello and introduce myself, but then figured, ah, what the hell, I want that cup of coffee now.
As for me, I spent an hour this morning lining up to Vote Early. It seemed a wonderful expression of popular enthusiasm for democracy, and I was all smug and stuff, and then I got to the little voting station and looked at the touch screen ballot and realized, wait a minute, I live in Cook County, Illinois, home of the nation’s most stalwart one-party stranglehold on power, during an election when one of its own is running for President. I have no more chance of affecting the outcome of the election for any of these offices, down to and including Recorder of Deeds, than I do of getting a letter inviting me to enroll at Hogwarts. That said, I did vote for the Green Party candidates for the Water Reclamation Board, because they had really cool names. Go, Rita Bogolub!
Turns out Corner watching is a national sport, and much has been made of a post Saturday night by Mark Levin.
It reminded me of another aspect of conspiracy theorizing, which I hadn’t previously thought about in a long while. Namely, that a conspiracy theory has the odd, but very pleasant effect of casting the theorizer in the role of hero. By virtue of your sole and unique understanding of the Vast Dark Forces arrayed against the nation, you become the Dark Force’s primary opponent, and the lone gunslinger standing against same. You are Gary Cooper in High Noon, the only one in town to stand up to villainy, or, in the case of Levin, at least, you are Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers… the only human left among the pod people:
The question is whether enough Americans understand what’s at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others.
Listen to me! Please listen! If you don’t, if you won’t, if you fail to understand, then the same incredible terror that’s menacing me WILL STRIKE AT YOU!
I am pleased (and a tad self-delusional, in that I have only spent one evening in his physical presence) to call John Hodgman a friend. Everybody knows that he is a) the PC in those ubiquitous Mac ads, b) a sometimes correspondent on the Daily Show, and c) an extremely funny, very original humorist. But he is also (kind of on the sly) d) a very smart guy, as he shows in his occasional long pieces of cultural journalism for the New York Times. In this Onion AV interview, the interviewer goes political and Hodgman goes right there with him, and offers the best non-insider analysis of the presidential campaign I’ve seen to date, and I include my own. Check it out. Executive summary: Obama will win because he inhabits the real world, and his opponents, for purposes of the campaign, do not.
And also, please, check out next weekend’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, because John will be our guest, live on stage. That’ll make it two evenings!
Last year, I was invited to present the annual achievement awards and make some remarks to members of the American Institute of Architects, Chicago chapter.
They invited me back for this year’s shindig, last night. My brief speech, in which I blamed them for my lack of a jetpack, is after the jump.
I love the National Review Online; read it all the time. I usually don’t agree with them, but everybody should regularly read smart people you don’t agree with. They have been a center of Palin advocacy. They just love her, they do.
Last night, in the CNN interview, Drew Griffin badly misused a quote from NR:
GRIFFIN: Governor, you’ve been mocked in the press, the press has been pretty hard on you, the Democrats have been pretty hard on you, but also some conservatives have been pretty hard on you as well. The National Review had a story saying that, you know, I can’t tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt or all of the above.
PALIN: Who wrote that one?
GRIFFIN: That was in the National Review. I don’t have the author.
PALIN: I’d like to talk to that person.
GRIFFIN: But they were talking about the fact that your experience as governor is not getting out. Do you feel trapped in this campaign, that your message is not getting out, and if so who do you blame?
That’s unfair because it came from a piece in the printed magazine by Palin fan Byron York in which he was setting up a straw man argument to knock it down; you know, “people say that” she is incompetent, stupid, etc, but here’s evidence that she’s not. Griffin took it out of context and reversed the NR’s meaning. But that’s not why I feel bad for the NR. This is why. It’s her answer to the question.
Palin: No, I’m getting my message out right now, through you and with you, Drew, to the American people who are watching CNN, and I appreciate this opportunity. No, you know that, I am obviously an outsider of the Washington elite and of the conventional, I think, media, targets or media characters that have been a part of this for years and, I think that is fine, that is good for the American electorate to understand. They have a choice here in our ticket of having the experience and the reputation that comes with John McCain as being the patriot and the maverick in the Senate, you take that and you combine it with a team member who is new and fresh with new ideas, new vision, new energy that needs to be infused into Washington, D.C., with that commitment to clean it up in D.C. Put government on the side of the people and fight hard for Americans. You have that, that combination and I think that some in the media, maybe in The National Review, they don’t know what to make of that, they’re like, gee, she’s, you know, where’d she come from, surely, you know, it should be our job I think they assume is to, pick and, and be negative and, and find things to mock and, that’s just I guess part of the political game, I guess.
She had no idea who or what the National Review is. If she did, she would have said something like, “Actually, the National Review has been a big supporter of mine, so I’m sure you must be misquoting them, or quoting some kind of dissenting letter to the editor.”
I remember being in junior high school, and having a crush on Abby Berkowitz, and realizing, sadly, that I just didn’t exist to her.
People sometimes ask me why we don’t make fun of Barack Obama as much as we do of other politicians. They assume it’s liberal bias, but it’s not: check out our shows leading up to the 2004 election. Check out our treatment of Hillary Clinton in this election. It’s hard to explain exactly what the problem is, but then I saw this picture today:
Somebody made up a personalized Mickey Mouse hat for him while he was visiting Florida, and he walked over to the photographers assembled, and said, “How much would you pay me to put this on?” And they offered five bucks, ten bucks, and he laughed, and said “not enough,” and walked away, and it goes without saying, he did not put on the hat.
He never puts on the hat. He never — or at least, almost never — makes the kind of trivial error that gives us an opening to mock. He never does this:
(As a commenter notes, that’s McCain making a momentary, intentionally self-mocking funny face as he realizes he’s leaving the debate stage the wrong way. Unfortunately, he did it in front of a thousand cameras, and people who don’t like him have access to the film. It’s a perfectly normal, even endearingly human thing to do. I make faces like that all the time. Everybody does. Except Obama.)
Whatever an Obama administration does for the country, it’ll be hard on us.
Thoughts after a sleepless night tossing and turning about the Red Sox loss…
Anybody unlucky enough to engage me in a conversation about sports (particularly baseball, specifically the Sawx) will eventually hear me go on about the Sports Fan’s Paradox, also known (via Seinfeld) as Rooting for the Laundry. Viz: we become fans of a team, and become emotionally invested in the fortunes of (at least in major league pro sports) millionaires who just happen, usually through no fault or volition of their own, to wear the uniforms of Our Team. The “now we are at war with Eastasia” randomness of loving a player in your laundry, hating the player when he wears somebody else’s (see Damon, Johnny) is bad enough, but it gets even weirder when you find yourself, sane rational person that you fancy yourself to be, becoming emotionally invested in the personality and character of somebody who a) has no real relationship to you, except you help pay his salary via tickets/beer/hotdog/sitting through TV and radio ads, and b) — and here’s the thing that drives me crazy — may be, apart and aside from his ability to throw/hit/run/pitch, be a cheat, an adulterer, a jerk, or all three.
Further! There is an entire sub-industry of PR folk, in-house media, advertising, and compliant sports journalists, who conspire to prevent you from finding out what these people are really like, because it is in their financial and professional interest to do so, and still and still and still, you root for them and cheer for them and invest them with your affection and enthusiasm and hopes, or at least, I do.
Which brings me to Jason Varitek. For ten years now, he has been the starting catcher for the Boston Red Sox, his only MLB team, and with them he has won two World Series, caught four no hitters (a record) won a Gold Glove, and been named one of only four players in the team’s long history to be named Captain. Other players, especially pitchers, seem to love him, praising his leadership to the skies. He does lots of charity events, is accessible to the media, and always carries himself well on the field. In an interview, once, he was asked something about him that was surprising, and he said, “If you were my neighbor, I’d loan you my square shovel. ” I loved that. Not just his shovel. His square shovel. Last year, right after the Sox won their second World Series in three years, Varitek sat out in his driveway, in a lawnchair, all night on Halloween, and signed autographs for trick or treaters.
This was the last year of his four year contract, and it was a terrible year for him offensively. He hit .220, and went 0 for a lot in the two championship series he played. He hit a go-ahead homer in Game 6, yay, but flailed pointlessly in Game 7, going hitless, leaving men on base. And so I feel bad for him. Major League teams tend not to sign 37 year old catchers, particularly once they go into an offensive slump. His career might be over; his career with the Red Sox as a player probably is, and it ended poorly. Also, he got divorced this year.
On the other hand, he’s a surpremely gifted and successful professional athlete, who’s been among the elite since childhood, and lived a rarefied life of success and wealth that I can only dream about. Whatever happens to him, he will be wealthy beyond measure, and will have every opportunity he wants to succeed in whatever other endeavor he chooses, because that’s how we treat people like him. And, for all I know, despite the square shovel, he might be a complete jerk. If he was, nobody would go out of their way to tell us.
But there I was, wide awake when I knew I should be getting some rest, wondering and worrying about how he felt, replaying his last at-bats, thinking about what kind of contract he might get offered. Am I right to feel bad for him? Or should he feel bad for me?
I love conspiracy theories, and have been fascinated by those who promulgate them ever since I wrote a play about one such strain — Holocaust denial — back in the 90s. When you write a play, you literally must speak for the characters, and you try to fit yourself into their heads. Why would somebody believe in an elaborate, counter-intuitive, highly improbable international conspiracy to — in this example — fake the mountain of evidence for the Holocaust, rather than just accept reality? Because reality is intolerable. It is intolerable to some that their heroes, the Germans, committed industrialized mass murder. It is intolerable to others that their hero, JFK, was murdered by a solitary nutbag who happened to be a very good shot. It’s intolerable to still others that all life descended from a single origin via natural selection. So, all these (otherwise very different) people devote a tremendous amount of time and energy explaining away the existing evidence and inventing (more or less) counter-evidence. Because all that work and time and energy is a blessing; it frees them from the prison of the real world.
In the real world, Barack Obama seems like he’s going to be elected President. This, as unlikely as it might have seemed as little as two years ago, is easily explained: the Republicans have done a poor job running the country, have a very unpopular incumbent President, and our nation likes to switch parties about every 8 to 12 years. Plus, Obama is a charismatic politician who’s run a very competent campaign.
If you want to take a look at their reasoning, I recommend the work of Stanley Kurtz over at the National Review. But what I’m most interested in is the unstated but necessary conditions for all this to be true:
1) That Barack Obama is, and has been at least from his college days, a conscienceless, hermetic liar, who refused to reveal his true agenda and thoughts to anyone other than his co-conspirators; not to his casual friends, students, colleagues, employers, clients and constituents, and that his two books on his life and political beliefs are nothing but a pack of lies, possibly ghostwritten by others. Further, that Obama never acted in any significant way to advance that Marxist/radical agenda in any of his prior jobs or offices, presumably because if he had done so (by, say, putting forward a radical Marxist bill in the Illinois State Senate, where he served for 12 years,) he would have blown his cover, and ruined his chance to become President, which has always been his goal, and from which office he will finally enact his true agenda;
2) and/or that those of his friends/colleagues/co-conspirators to whom he did reveal his true agenda, (William Ayers, et al) have also maintained absolute perfect silence/mendacity on the topic, forever, as no one who actually knows Obama has ever said, “You know, once he’s got a couple of drinks in him, he starts going on about Che and finishing the Revolution;”
3) and/or all the sensible, centrist, often bipartisan things Obama did do (eg. the bill to tape interrogations in Illinois) the hundreds of thousands of dollars he he helped hand out via the Annenberg Challenge to things like literacy programs, et. al, were all mere cover for his true, as of yet unenacted agenda;
4) and/or all the national newspapers and news channels that have scoured every aspect of Obama’s life, from his childhood in Indonesia to his career as a law professor to his wife’s honor’s thesis at Princeton, and who have revealed absolutely no evidence of anything but Obama being an extremely intelligent, perhaps overly cautious and eager-to-please good-government liberal, have either themselves been duped or, more likely, are in on the scam.
They never say it explicitly, but in order for their theory to be correct, the Obama conspiracy theorists have to believe that some or all of things are true. Do they? I’d love to know.
I recently reunited with an old friend who I haven’t seen in some years, who, the intervening time, had become a 9/11 Truther. In short, she believes that 9/11 was an inside job, engineered by the Bush Administration, in order to enact their agenda. And I said to her: why in the world would they bother?
UPDATE — Thanks to some links around the internet — thanks, Mr. Kottke! — this little post has drawn more than the usual dribs and drabs of comment. Already up into the 20s! Woo-hoo!
I decided not to argue with any of the commenters — that way madness lies — but I did want to take issue with this meme, expressed succinctly by James L, below: “Obama has faced no scrutiny by any mainstream news source. None.”
As a friend used to say, that’s just crazy talk. I live in Chicago, and have for ten years. His career here and then his rise to national prominence was extensively covered in the local papers, both of which lean right editorially. Since his appearance on the national stage four years ago, he’s been covered, exhaustively, by the national papers and news networks. Some examples: last year, Obama sat down with the Chicago Tribune to discuss, in detail, his associations with felonious fundraiser Tony Rezko. (Go here, then click on the Multimedia presentation about the Obama Rezko connection.) The New York Times has been running a series of profiles, under the heading, The Long Run, over the past two years. You can find an archive here, including in depth stories about his mother, his career in community organizing, and yes, a front page story on his drug use, which another commenter says has never been examined. Other major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, also conveniently collect all their extensive Obama coverage on a single web-page, for your perusal. I invite you to peruse them.
Perhaps, to some minds, these aren’t mainstream news organizations, which raises the question: then what is? And also: what among these voluminous articles, based on actual reporting, is factually incorrect? (And I mean facts, not implied judgments.) Most likely, the commenters below would respond that these stories are not incorrect, per se, but incomplete, as they don’t report on, again, his radical Marxist/socialist/Afro-centric/terroristic/Anti-American activities and beliefs. And that’s true, they don’t. And logically, there are two, and only two, reasons as to why they would not report those things:
A) There is, in fact, no evidence for any of those accusations, or
B) All of these news organizations — the LA and NY Times, The Tribune and Sun Times, the Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal (news pages), everybody from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, to the Miami Herald, from the San Diego Union to the Portland Press Herald — every single one — the same newspapers that were happy to dig up and print any dirt they could find on Democratic Presidents and Governors and candidates in the past – are in on the scam.
At this point, with the gallons of ink spilled and trillions of pixels expended on covering Obama, those are the only two options left. Which do you choose?
FURTHER UPDATE: Andy McCarthy, at the National Review, has written what must be the Ur-document, the founding text, of the Obama Conspiracy Movement. It’s got everything: copious quotes from the man himself, lots of connections and links and names and explanations and ipso factos and QEDs. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand this line of thinking.
