Gail Collins. Again. (I Hate Myself)

I feel like I should apologize. I don't mean to pick on Gail Collins any more than the other imbeciles at the New York Times. But MoDo punted this week, letting her brother write her column for her. Friedman keeps the globetrotting act up, forgetting that no one over here cares enough about Myanmar--or is it Burma?--to read his attempts to milk the last dregs out of The World is Flat. Paul "The Bearded Wonder" Krugman has been a broken record warning off deflation and condemning austerity measures for months. It takes Gail Collins' brand of idiocy to break through the intellectual malaise over there.

What Everything Means

Alternate title: “The Meaning of Life in 811 Words.” I have found my new spiritual guide in Gail Collins.

By GAIL COLLINS

I can’t stop thinking about the elections.

Fun exercise: Read this article with "elections" changed to "Justin Bieber" and it actually starts sounding like it was written by a tween. 

I worry that I'll never be able
to respect this generation.

Also, you've got to replace "Congress" with "Degrassi: The Next Generation," and "Republicans" with any interchangeable member of the cast of Jersey Shore. (Two Jersey Shore references in one week? That's right. I'm about 6 months behind the pop-culture curve.)

Last weekend I saw “127 Hours,” and all I could think about was that this was a metaphor for the lame-duck session of Congress.

She’s so up on her pop culture. And how about that James Franco kid!

 “127 Hours” is the hot new movie

Is it just me or does this sound like that crazy aunt telling you in 1998 that the Neo-Geo was some “hot” newfangled gizmo. 

Thank God I came of age on the Sega Genesis.
The bosses looked much less like penises.

Granted, this may be because I’m already bored with 127 hours and it just came out.

about Aron Ralston, a real-life hiker who 

went on the grand adventure of selling the movie rights to his story...I'm getting ahead of myself.

went for a jaunt

Yes, the movie has the upbeat and jovial tone befitting a jaunt.

through the Utah wilderness and fell into a hole, where his arm was pinned under an 800-pound boulder for, um, 127 hours.

…Backstory backstory backstory…

Then he sawed off his arm with a really, really dull knife,

It's her fluency with words that keeps me coming back.

rappelled 60 feet to the canyon floor and walked several miles in the midday desert sun before being found by a family of Dutch tourists, who gave him water and two Oreo cookies.

Excellent nutshelling, but I’ll just watch Open Water 2. It's much cheaper. And has sharks, or something.

Float harder!

So I just sat there free-associating about politics.

The red lights in my head just went off. This is going to be disastrous.

The boulder was the deficit,

I’m with you so far.

and the arm was the Bush tax cut for the wealthy.

There it is.

While he was trapped, Ralston was tortured by a lot of buzzing, stinging and biting insects, all of whom resembled Mitch McConnell.

Please excuse me while I purging my consciousness of profanities and slightly darker thoughts.

If you get obsessive enough, everything you hear carries a postelection message.

Okay I’m back and I feel much better. One can not, in deference to intellectual honesty, claim that repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (a colossally misguided distinction in and of itself) will simultaneously be a panacea for the debt crisis and have no measurable drag on the overall economy. If the cuts don’t amount to much, they can’t impact the debt; if they amount to a lot, then pulling this money out of the economy must be a draining force. What Collins and her woefully misguided ilk misunderstand is that tax cuts have the added benefit of growing the economy and the tax base for years to come. If it sounds like a good idea to hamper that growth for insignificant immediate revenues, then you might be a liberal.

The Carnival Cruise ship is adrift! And isn’t America exactly like a boat full of vacationers who thought they were on a luxury trip to the Mexican Riviera?

Again, I’m with her so far.

Then, all of a sudden, they’re standing in line for Spam and hoping somebody will tow them back to San Diego.

Recessionproofing

Only Mexicans try to go to San Diego. The rest of the country migrates away from that municipality-train wreck.

No wonder Ohio turned red.

As an expatriate son of the Buckeye State, I couldn't be prouder. It’s one more thing that separates the great state of Ohio from the great armpit of Michigan. (That and Ohio actually has a good football team.)

The moral of the George W. Bush TV interview this week with Matt Lauer involves the fact that it got terrible ratings.

That’s not even close to a moral. It may not even qualify as a piece of trivia. Factoid is more apt.

This could mean that the public wants to forget all about the first eight years of the 21st century and just blame Barack Obama for wrecking the economy. Or that while the country is divided in so many ways, we’re still one big family when it comes to our national exhaustion with the previous president.

Alternately: conservatives have long since learned that NBC is a wasteland of liberal bias and listened to the Bush interviews on both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (and probably other conservative outlets). I, for one, was astounded at how emotional I got when I heard President Bush recount the events of 9/11 on the Sean Hannity Show. It was an exceptional interview.

Although if people had known he was going to tell that story about how his mother put the miscarried fetus in a jar and made him look at it, perhaps more viewers would have tuned in.

Missed that one, but I guess that's the point.

Or maybe not.

Yeah, I don’t want to hear about that.

The whole interview was confusing. When the first George Bush was president, the White House seemed to go out of its way to drop hints that Barbara Bush was pro-choice.

Why would they do that? Laura Bush legitimately is pro-choice. That reminds me that I haven't read Mark Morford in a while. Should be good for a laugh.

Did they know about the fetus jar story?

Also, didn’t it seem as if George W. was way more upset about Kanye West calling him a racist during Katrina than the fact that he invaded the wrong country?

Which would be relevant, unless (WATCH OUT FOR DOUBLE-NEGATIVES!) President Bush didn’t invade the wrong country.

And did you notice that Bush kept calling Kanye “Conway?”

No.

But I digress.

You can't digress if you don't actually have a point.

To be honest, the interview did not get bad ratings because of the national malaise. It got bad ratings because it was up against “Dancing With the Stars.”

Also, conservatives tuned in through their own news outlets.

In which Bristol Palin has made it to the final four. Once again, traditional Republicans were run over by the grizzly contingent.

What happened to taking back momma grizzly?

Bristol is not very good as a performer, but, as her mother put it, “She’s never danced before, and here she’s learning the steps really quickly.”

Really, where is this going. You just acknowledged your digression, and now you wander into the wilderness of incoherence with the elegance of a blindfolded toddler on an obstacle course.

Bristol is up against Jennifer Grey of “Dirty Dancing” fame,

Fame might be an overstatement. I simply remember her in fragments from my “Crazy for Swayze” phase. Also, she was an original Charlie Sheen groupie in Ferris Bueler’s Day Off. God bless you, John Hughes.

Now there's a guy who knows his hookers.

who’s been doing great even though she’s 50 with a bad knee and a plate and four screws in her neck.

Still, she learned from the best. Some would construe that as a distinct advantage.

Yes, he will roundhouse kick you.

If Bristol wins I think we can take the whole thing as a metaphor for Russ Feingold’s Senate race in Wisconsin.

So…the inevitable beat-down of a tired old hag who has lost all connection with his/her constituency? Actually that kind of works.

Finally, when popular culture can’t explain what’s befallen us, there’s always historic reference.

I’m going to need to walk away from the computer pretty soon. I’m just warning you ahead of time.

David Kennedy of Stanford University theorized in a postelection Op-Ed in The Times that we’re reliving the late 19th-century Gilded Age,

No way! This guy just happens to be a historical expert from the late-19^th to early 20^th centuries and he sees parallels? Eerie.

when all the presidents proved to be hapless, Congress switched back and forth madly as voters threw the bums out over and over again,

You'll notice that Republicans had congressional control for 12 years before the moderate policies of President Bush led to a four year relegation. That bears repeating: it took only four years of Democratic control of congress, and two years of Democrats running the country for the American people to recoil in horror.

and the country experienced a raft of critical problems and impending crises, combined with “abject political paralysis.”

This was also the age when Progressivism was introduced into the American political scene. And by Progressivism, I am of course using a euphemism for "the cause of all of our political problems."

The Gilded Age also happened to be the time when the media was wildly fragmented,

Jesus, she’s coming back around to a disdain for those damned newfangled interblags, isn’t she?

with thousands of small, underfinanced local newspapers all yapping frantically to try to make an impression.

It must’ve been hell to have free expression that rampant. The marketplace of ideas can be brutal. Good thing Collins and the Times did everything they could to coalesce power and introduce barriers to entry for the marketplace. That is, until the internet and all those interblags (I’m going to keep using that term as a shout-out to Collins’ tech-savvy) came along and ruined EVERYTHING.

This produced a climate of semihysterical sensationalism, along with some of my all-time favorite headlines. One about Gov. Oliver Morton read: “A Few of the Hellish Liaisons of, and Attempted Seductions by, Indiana’s Favorite Stud-Horse.”

*Crickets*

This sounds so familiar that I am pretty sure Professor Kennedy is right.

End of discussion. We are now officially in 1896, Who’s up for invading Cuba?

I wrote my first research paper on how the Spanish-American War permanently  realigned the geopolitics of the Western Hemisphere and remained the United States' only foray into imperialism. This simultaneously established the United States as a world power and weakened the Monroe Doctrine's role in American foreign policy...Holy crap, I'm recreating the paper in a caption.

So the message is that we should hunker down and wait for the next Teddy Roosevelt to come to our rescue.

Jesus, she really thinks Teddy Roosevelt was a political rescuer? You do know that he was a Republican, right?

And then it will almost be time for Prohibition.

I was kidding about the Cuba thing.

On the other hand, the Gilded Age had Mark Twain

With you so far…

and Eugene Debs

Pining for a socialist union leader isn’t helping your case…

and Lillian Russell, who exemplified a beauty standard that extolled fleshy women.

Maybe with a change in those damnable standards for beauty Gail can finally wrangle herself a husband. Yes, I know Gail Collins is married, but seriously…this effete imbecile looks like he gets flop-sweat when girl scouts aggressively peddle Thin Mints.

A Virginia City man writing to a friend about a tightrope walker named Ella LaRue said admiringly: “Great ‘shape’ — more of it than I ever saw in any female. Immense across the hips — huge thighs.”

Is this even approximately related to anything other than Gail Collins' crippling insecurities?

Maybe it won’t be so bad after all.

Yes, it was a time where a writer could make outlandish statements in quick succession without even bothering to link the two together with any semblance of coherent thought. Writers called it Shangri-La.

Thank you, Gail Collins, as always, for your unique brand of bat-shit crazy.