When we want your opinion, we'll tell it to you.

Now that the Republican and Democratic conventions have skulked into history--the ash heap of history as Trotsky might have said, I've had a chance to reflect a bit on what we viewed.

But first, this. Recently I bought a four-dvd set of the entire first season of the classic 60s television show "Get Smart." Get Smart was pretty good stuff. Mel Brooks and Buck Henry were no slouches as comedy writers and Don Adams had timing and facial expressions nearly equal to great film comedians like Laurel and Hardy or Harold Lloyd.

Despite the talent involved with Get Smart, however, some producer somewhere felt the need to add a laugh track. A laugh track, that is, "you don't know what's funny, we, the producers (or sponsors) don't trust your ability to think or react, so we'll prompt reactions via sound design."

Now back to Denver and St. Paul. Spout lies, half-truths, over-simplifications and paeans to pusillanimity--then cut to the blondes in the audience lapping it up, laughing, clapping, ooooohing and ahhhhing as they're told.

This is what we've become reduced to. We don't think. We respond to cues.

Useful phrases from Click and Clack.

The following is from the NPR radio show "Car Talk." I'm sure the phrases contained below will come in handy.

Alternative Ways of Calling Someone Stupid


*A few beads short in her rosary.
*A few too many lights out in his Christmas tree.
*A few french fries short of a Happy Meal.
*A room temperature IQ.
*A walking argument for birth control.
*Batteries not included.
*Differently clued.
*Elevator doesn't go all the way to the penthouse.
*Elevator goes all the way to the top but the door doesn't open.
*Four cents short of a nickel.
*Got into the gene pool while the lifeguard wasn't watching.
*He's so dense, light bends around him.
*His head whistles in a crosswind.
*His mind wandered and never came back.
*If he were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week.
*If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean.
*It's hard to believe he beat 100,000 other sperm.
*Knitting with only one needle.
*Living proof that nature does not abhor a vacuum.
*Plays solitaire for cash.
*Receiver is off the hook.
*So dumb, blondes tell jokes about him.
*Takes her two hours to watch 60 Minutes.
*The cheese slid off his cracker.
*Uses his head to keep the rain out of his neck.

And the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and bathroom stalls.

With apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, I was just in the mens' room at a quick service restaurant for a quick service pee. And the little, plastic perforated thing at the bottom of the urinal designed, I suppose, to keep cigarette butts out of the drain had an advertising message on it.

"Swisher. A healthy respect for hygiene."

I know I haven't a media background but I can't quite comprehend the value of urinal advertising.

Why does a local fish market have a smarter positioning than virtually every company in the Fortune 500?

Early yesterday morning on my way to work, when most account people were still in bed dreaming of 89-page decks, I saw this truck. Its slogan made me smile. Which isn't the worst thing a slogan can do.

(BTW, I don't like fish. As W.C. Fields once said when asked why he never drinks water, "Fish fuck in it."

George Orwell on the Republican Convention.

George Orwell's novel 1984 refers to the Big Lie theory on several occasions.
Here are two examples:

“The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”

“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed."

A topical octad.

I can say without fear of failin'
I have a crush on Sarah Palin.
She's the veep of John McCain
Her shapely legs drive me insane.
I think you know just what I mean,
She makes me wish I were seventeen.
I'm not just speaking for my-silf,
She's more than a VP, she's a VP-ilf.

Clarity of thought. Beauty of expression.

Yesterday a Creative Director I work with showed me a piece of copy that a freelancer wrote. It was dreadful. Run-on sentences. Mis-placed modifiers. Subject/verb disagreement. And, perhaps worst, the copywriter buried the lede. (Lede is the correct spelling in this case. You couldn't write "lede" "lead" because "lead" is a printer's term and therefore would be confusing. But I digress.)

As the CD and I were lamenting the decline of writing, thought, America and the fact that no one finds the original "Get Smart" funny anymore, I started thinking about one of my writing heroes.

Joseph Mitchell worked at The New Yorker for nearly sixty years. During that time he produced millions of words in hundreds of brilliant pieces of journalism. Many of the cognoscenti regard Mitchell as one of the founders of "New" journalism. Check out his collection "Up in the Old Hotel," or my favorite of his (which has just been republished) "Bottom of the Harbor." The selection below is from the later:

"Nevertheless there is considerable marine life in the harbor water and on the harbor bottom. Under the paths of liners and tankers and ferries and tugs, fish school and oysters spawn and lobsters nest. There are clams on the sludgy bottom, and mussels and mud shrimp and conchs and crabs and sea worms and sea plants. Bedloe's Island, the Statue of Liberty Island, is in a part of the harbor that is grossly polluted, but there is a sprinkling of soft-shell clams in the mud beneath the shallow water that surrounds it."

That is writing.

---
PS. The painting above is called "McSorley's Saloon." Mitchell wrote a wonderful series of essays about it.

Just give me ten seconds.

Imagine for ten seconds that Sarah Palin was black. She of five children. She of a husband convicted of drunk-driving. Most important, she the mother of a 17-year-old who went and got herself knocked-up.

Imagine the outrage, the racist venom, the welfare-mother, Willie Horton equivalency if a young, black female candidate had a teenager unmarried and preggers.

The joy of dumb.

As a New Yorker, I consider myself lucky. Though their numbers are fast dwindling, we still have a few independent bookstores left. In such stores, the staff can read, the books are well-displayed, and the selection is usually devoid of books by Ann Coulter that mainstream anti-semite. In other words, there is a degree of intelligence in such stores.

This morning, however, I stopped in on a Barnes & Noble, the Duane Reade of bookstore. I came upon this section: "New History."

Oy.

A year ago I was in Arizona.

Driving up to see the Grand Canyon.
Occasionally there are scenic overlooks.
You pull over to look.
And you see the sheer cliffs.
The striated geology.
Then you read what the National Parks Service has to say about those rocks.
Formed billions of years ago.
That level there formed billions more years ago.
Billions.
I wondered.
At the time.
What would happen to those signs.
If a "creationist" were elected president.
Would they be re-written to describe.
The longer finger of god remaking the landscape.
His whim. To create a canyon overnight.
What will happen.
When a moose eating, polar-bear denying, shale shill is.
Vice president?