The Free Press ran a story this weekend that said a customer boycott of British Petroleum “won’t accomplish much.” It will hurt independent station owners, who have zero power and influence over the corporate policies that have led to so much misery in the Gulf of Mexico. Leave it to an academic to lay it out:

Michigan State University economics professor Charles Ballard said a boycott “will have very little effect” on BP.

“For one thing, not all of BP’s products are bought by American consumers of gasoline,” Ballard said this week. The public would be better off supporting a tough congressional examination of the April 20 explosion and stricter regulations on offshore oil operations, he said.

Hmm. Well. Can we put a dollar value on the satisfaction it gives me to drive past the BP on the corner — a station I have patronized many times — and give my business to the Shell down the street? If so, I’m putting it at one hillion jillion dollars, and I’m going to keep doing so until I get tired of my imaginary money piling up. If it hurts the independent operator, I’m sorry, but at this point it is the sole concrete action I’m capable of at the moment to express my rage at this colossal fuck-up, so, there it is.

I’m also encouraging all cultural portrayals of BP as a bunch of arrogant, incompetent numbnuts. Yes, I have signed on as a follower of BPGlobalPR, the joke Twitter account:

Best part of the BP Memorial Day Picnic? The custom made oily dunk tank! So far we’ve dunked 4 ducks, a dolphin, 2 otters and @bpTerry!

Due to public outcry, our “Spill Or Be Spilled” flash game will be taken off our BP Kidz Klub website. “Smack the Greasy Manatee” stays.

Yes, I intend to heap ridicule and scorn upon BP, its staggeringly clue-free management team and anything else I can think of. I know it’s silly and possibly hypocritical — I still drive a car, don’t I? — but at the moment, it’s what I can do. It’s all I can do.

What do you call a boatload of BP executives sinking in oil-covered seas with no lifeboats, each one leaping into the vile mix of crude and salt water, flailing to stay afloat before their lungs fill with the poisoned mixture and they sink to the bottom to be eaten by oil-mutated bottom-feeders?

A GREAT start!

If that makes me un-American, well, screw you, Rand Paul.

I hope you all had a pleasant Mem Day weekend. I was struck by this comment by MichaelG, late yesterday:

My father served during WWII, I went to Vietnam twice, my son in law will be leaving for his second trip to Afghanistan in July and my daughter will be a single mom again for a year. I am righteously offended by fatuous assholes who have never served urging me to “remember the troops this Memorial Day.” Sorry. I’ll get off my soap box now.

Funny. Alan’s father was a decorated combat infantryman in World War II. He got the shit shot out of him en route to winning three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, the works. You know what he told his son as he grew to manhood? “Keep playing that trumpet. Get good enough so that if you get drafted, you can play in the Army band. Those guys never see combat.” I find it fascinating that of the whole Bush administration hall of shame that got us into this shitstorm in Iraq, the one guy who had serious doubts was the one guy who actually went to Vietnam and didn’t work deferment after deferment, or get a National Guard post keeping the homeland safe from Canadian invasion.

Have I got some bloggage for you:

First, related to the above: What Gold Star families want you to know. No. 1: Don’t say “closure” unless you’re talking about a door.

Mom says giving birth while driving was “no big deal.” In a Chevy Cobalt? It most certainly was.

Time to make Kate’s lunch and push forward into a new week. But a short one. Enjoy yours.

A short, relatively restrained rant about banks:

Our bank was recently swallowed by another bank. Yay, invisible hand of the market, which punished our previous bank’s bad business practices with death. Now we have a new, better bank. Theoretically.

Of course, the last bank was a swallower too, once upon a time. I moved to Fort Wayne in 1984, back when a bank was a bank, rewarded you for your business and generally followed the rules of an ordered universe. I was new in town, invited to dinner at a new friend’s house.

“I’m looking for a bank,” I said.

“I go to Fort Wayne National,” he said.

“Sold.”

Fort Wayne National’s marketing slogan at the time was, “That’s my bank.” Simplicity itself. All I really cared about was whether they had a lot of ATMs, and whether any were near my home and office. They were. I stayed with them until they were sold to National Spitty (name cleverly disguised to fool some PR agency’s Google alerts), and had the sort of relationship you have with a bank in those days — they kept my money, sold me traveler’s checks before I hit the road, exchanged U.S. dollars for Canadian before our annual theater trip.

The problem came when we moved here. There were National Spitty banks in reasonably convenient locations, and although Indiana’s unique banking laws (i.e., rooted in the 12th century) required us to open new accounts in Michigan, we stayed with them. Why? Because when you’re a Midwesterner, you plod through your life like a mule down a furrow, that’s why. Because we’d been NatSpit customers for years.

Not long afterward, I deposited several thousand dollars in miscellaneous checks at an ATM at the closest location (in Detroit), went about my financial business and, a few days later, received a sheaf of overdraft notices, at $30 per. I called the branch where I’d deposited them and asked what the hell. The manager treated me the way she might treat a panhandling bum, only with less charm. I might be committing check fraud, she said, so she’d held the funds for 10 business days. Who were these payers, anyway, these obscure businesses like “The Detroit News” and “Hearst Publications.” Anyway, I was a new customer. I fit the profile of a sleazebag fraud artist to a T.

“I’ve been a National Spitty customer for 15 years!” I said.

I called the other National Spitty branch nearby, the one in Grosse Pointe Farms. The woman on the phone said, “Oh, you NEVER want to do business in Detroit if you can avoid it. Deposit your checks here, I handle the ATM, and I’ll credit you right away.”

Yes, they actually tell you that here. It’s like Eddie Murphy’s Mr. White sketch, only (Psycho violins) …real.

So things have been bumping along with NatSpit, and over time I realized, like all Americans, that banking had slipped beneath the waves, insofar as customer relations go. My relationship with the people who facilitate my bill-paying and otherwise spare me the hassle of keeping my cash buried in the back yard is cordial enough, but there’s no part of the experience I’d describe as pleasant. In fact, one of the things I generally liked about NatSpit was the way they made it easy for me not to interact with them, by keeping their online service fairly robust. Woe betide if things didn’t go well, however — reaching a human being, at least one with the power to make anything right, was nearly impossible.

(I did visit the Detroit branch where they’d held my checks, once. It resembled nothing so much as a ghetto liquor store, the tellers behind inch-thick bulletproof plexiglass. No wonder they were so testy.)

Long story short, now we’re with another goddamn bank, and already I hate them. They changed all my account numbers and sent me a new debit card, screwing up my gym membership, which is automatically debited. And we discovered a new wrinkle: Unlike National Spitty, which allowed you to transfer money between accounts online and access the funds from the receiving account immediately, ThreeCapitalLetters Bank does not. At least not if it’s a weekend. If you dare to move your money — YOUR OWN MONEY, which I feel the need to add in caps — on a Saturday, you can’t spend it from the receiving account until MONDAY NIGHT. The woman on the phone didn’t even feel the need to apologize for this. Screw you, sucker, we know you’re not going to take your business elsewhere. What, and redo all your direct-deposit arrangements and go through this hassle again? Besides, every other bank in town is going to give you the same deal. Why? Because we can. Have a nice day, and go get your fuckin’ shine box.

Oh, why bother with this? You all have your own tales of pain and woe, if not with banks, then with health insurance companies, mortgage holders or whomever. Here’s what amuses me most about them — how, in our allegedly perfect market-based system, our customer experience should be improving year to year. In some ways, it has, although I credit technology (the ATM) more than management. But mostly, banking — and many other allegedly service-based businesses — has only become more Soviet with time, more monolithic, less sensitive to customer complaint, more frustrating to deal with. Yes, I enjoy checking my balance online or over the phone. No, I don’t like being nickel-and-dimed — or ten-dollared and thirty-dollared — to death over every little thing.

But hey! It’s a holiday weekend! Let’s change the mood:

In the minutes after a cascade of gas explosions crippled the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, confusion reigned on the drilling platform. Flames were spreading rapidly, power was out, and terrified workers were leaping into the dark, oil-coated sea. Capt. Curt Kuchta, the vessel’s commander, huddled on the bridge with about 10 other managers and crew members.

Andrea Fleytas, a 23-year-old worker who helped operate the rig’s sophisticated navigation machinery, suddenly noticed a glaring oversight: No one had issued a distress signal to the outside world, she recalls in an interview. Ms. Fleytas grabbed the radio and began calling over a signal monitored by the Coast Guard and other vessels.

“Mayday, Mayday. This is Deepwater Horizon. We have an uncontrollable fire.”

When Capt. Kuchta realized what she had done, he reprimanded her, she says.

“I didn’t give you authority to do that,” he said, according to Ms. Fleytas, who says she responded: “I’m sorry.”

OK, sorry. Here’s something else, genuinely interesting. The death of the one-word exam at All Soul’s College, Oxford:

The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun (“water,” for instance, or “bias”) that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility, but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything.

This is the sort of thing that would have terrified me at 19, but today I think I’d totally ace. What is blogging, if not a daily essay with a one-word prompt? (“Banking.”) However, what I find most interesting about this story is the glimpse at how they arrange things at Oxford. One of my former colleagues’ girlfriends was a Rhodes Scholar, and enrolled at New College. Punchline: Founded in 1379. Those Brits. Such a sense of humor.

The best single line from a “Sex and the City 2” pan (and this, friends, is a crowded field): “…essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.” Respect to Lindy West, The Stranger.

And with that, I guess it’s time to start the weekend. Have a good long one. I intend to get outdoors. You?

Already-plowed ground alert: I try not to take all my cues from “This American Life,” but ever since I heard #1 Party School earlier this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about drinking on college campuses, which from recent descriptions, sound like the new Indian reservations, alcohol-wise.

In comments yesterday, one of our Marks pointed out this Smoking Gun report on a wild debauch held by the Ohio University chapter of Pi Beta Phi sorority for their spring formal. This follows an earlier report on the same sorority, at Miami University this time, doing much the same thing. And a different sorority at Miami, same behavior.

If, by “debauch,” you’re thinking stained tablecloths and broken chairs, I encourage you to read the reports. I’m talking about vomit so copious it’s practically an intermezzo course at dinner, pee everywhere but where it belongs, poop on lawns and in urinals, and, of course, public sex.

If this were just a fraternity I might not have even taken note, but it so happens my subset of the baby boom happened to be the leading wave of new traditionalism, after the ’60s. All those Time magazine stories about the return of prom were written my senior year — 1975. If you’re all of a sudden going to prom again, you’re also going to pledge a fraternity or sorority, too.

Not me, I hasten to add. I’m about as un-Hellenic as you can get. Plus, Ohio University was a filthy-hippie haven at the time, although there were Greeks there. They didn’t dominate the social scene they way they did at Miami — the antimatter version of OU — or Ohio State, but they made their presence felt, and one of the things you learned about them was their pecking order. At the bottom, the “ugly-girl” house, was Phi Mu. Mark the Shark’s very pretty wife was a Phi Mu, and he taught me the frat-boy snark:

Rattle rattle rattle
Here come the cattle
Phi Mooooooo

But at the top were the Pi Beta Phis, the alpha girls, the mean girls, every single one of them blonde, beautiful and no larger than a size 2. The worst of the worst. Their male equivalent was Beta Theta Pi, and I expect they were paired off in a top-secret basement ritual, so that they’d only breed with one another and turn out a new generation of blonde tennis pros and Junior Leaguers.

I’m sure they drank plenty behind the doors of their respective houses, and I’m equally sure there was vomit, but I’d have been shocked if the peeing was done anywhere but the bathroom and the pooping? Please. These were the Pi Phis. They didn’t poop. Their waste was extruded in an even more secret manner than the pairing ritual, and when it emerged, smelled only of blueberry muffins.

Truth be told, it’s the public-sex part that concerns me most. The letter written by the owner of the trashed venue of the OU Pi Phi party this year mentions:

…”a couple engaging in sexual congress, while surrounded by a cheering throng,” and that a bathroom sink was broken as a result of “one of your members and her date attempting to have sexual relations on it, an act which was witnessed by the event’s caterer, who walked in on them.”

I know alcohol lowers inhibitions. I have had plenty of forehead-smacking moments of shame on many pitiless mornings after. I have been drunk in my life, believe you me. But even in my crazy early adulthood, I can no more imagine myself having sex surrounded by a cheering throng than I can imagine flying a plane into an office building. If this is what campus partying has come to, I’m worried.

In “#1 Party School” — which I encourage you to listen to, via stream or podcast — the statistics fly by in a blur. The two most depressing: Penn State (and many other schools like it) records about one alcohol-related student death a year. And the only thing, the only strategy that has proven even minimally effective in curbing the sort of blackout-seeking drinking that prevails on college campuses these days, is draconian police action — drunk-driving dragnets, aggressive ID policing in bars, raids on house parties, basically.

It’s pretty depressing, when you think about it. OU was a party school when I was there; rumor had it we were on a list somewhere, maybe in Playboy magazine. The main drag was one bar after another, and as any Econ 101 student can tell you, that meant lots of competition for customers. I believe I spent time in every one on Court and Union Streets in my college career, and I was familiar with them all — drink ‘n’ drown Monday, Texas Cocktail Tuesday, two-for-one Hump Day, daiquiris by the pitcher, beer by the bucket, you name it. Senior year, one of the bars installed a dentist chair for the latest wrinkle: You paid your money, sat in the chair, and they reclined you. You opened your mouth, and they poured several shots straight in, followed by a wheeeee spin in the chair to mix everything up. Then you were righted and sent on your wobbly way. I found this repulsive. By senior year, I was too sophisticated for such juvenile shenanigans.

Maybe that was the tipping point. It seemed to take drinking from social lubricant to blackout hastener. Where it is now is hard to say. I expect the Pi Phis will start drinking their hairspray next.

So, bloggage? Sure:

In re our discussion yesterday, the last days of Sen. Chris Dodd. Note the disconnect:

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd completed what might be the capstone of his legislative career last week by shepherding a major banking overhaul through the Senate, the guest book in his office offered a glimpse of why he is not seeking re-election. It includes these recent greetings from visitors who stopped by to pay their disrespects:

“Good bye and good riddance to you,” wrote one guest on May 16. “I know it’s tough, but I expected better,” said another (April 15). “Thank you for being corrupt” (March 26).

…“A natural, intuitive legislator,” Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, calls him. “Easily one of the best-liked members here,” said Senator Robert F. Bennett, Republican of Utah. Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said Mr. Dodd embodied “everything that is good about this place.”

Given the yin-and-yang dynamic that governs today’s political landscape, Mr. Dodd offers a basic object lesson: the more entrenched someone is in Washington, the less popular he is at home.

I’m sure everyone has heard by now about Sarah Palin’s new neighbor, whom she, in typically restrained fashion, basically accuses of looking at her tits and maybe even her sweet little girl. Now it’s time for the second-day story, which if I were assigning it would be: Who owns the house, and why did he or she rent it to a snoopy journalist in the first place? In other words, why do Sarah Palin’s neighbors hate her? (I suspect the answer is in the two-story, 6,000-square-foot TV studio/man cave/lady cave they’re building, but that’s just off the top of my head.

Dave Weigel:

She describes McGinniss as the author of “the bizarre anti-Palin administration oil development pieces that resulted in my Department of Natural Resources announcing that his work is the most twisted energy-related yellow journalism they’d ever encountered.”

Another way of putting it would be that McGinniss is an investigative journalist who wrote his first best-seller at age 26 and was shopping a book about Alaska and the oil industry when Palin was named John McCain’s running mate. And another way of describing those “bizarre” pieces is that no one has ever challenged the facts in them.

Palin, who has an undergraduate degree in journalism, should understand that articles don’t become untrue when the subjects don’t agree with them.

Mary Schmich: Hoarding is not entertaining. We had a case in the suburbs here a few months back, an elderly couple who died, along with their disabled daughter, when a fire broke out and they couldn’t reach the single clear exit to their house, because the rest were blocked by junk.

Ten a.m. already? Time to get moving.

We went sailing Sunday, and the long stretches watching the water go by were conducive to deep thinking. So I tried to remember:

When was the last time I was represented in the House of Representatives by someone who didn’t make me fume, wince or cringe?

It wasn’t yesterday, certainly: Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, mother to the vile Kwame, is my representative now. Her tripartite name seems born to be married to “grand jury investigation.” CAR-o-lyn CHEEKS Kil-PAT-rick. GRAND JU-ry in-vest-ti-GA-tion. It’s not quite iambic pentameter, but it works. She leases a vehicle, at taxpayer expense, to carry her around her district. True to the Kilpatrick School of Public Service, it is a Cadillac.

Before her, Mark Souder. No need to rehash that one.

Before him, Dan Coats. I remember Coats most for being author of the Communications Decency Act, although, to be sure, this was when he was a senator, after he’d been replaced in the House by the Goober. The CDA was overturned by the Supreme Court and by other courts in dribs and drabs, but what I mainly recall about it was, the law appeared to be written by people who still thought “the internet” = America Online.

Before Coats, I lived in Ohio. Ah yes — how can I forget Chalmers Wylie? Wylie made headlines when he tried to strip the Library of Congress of $103,000, the precise dollar amount it took to produce Braille editions of Playboy magazine.

Think about that for a minute.

If nothing else, it gave the city’s newspaper columnists enough fodder to fatten a feedlot. “I’m only feeling it for the interviews” was but one of the witticisms our own came up with.

For all the college degrees among its voters, Columbus was in general not well-served by its delegation when I lived there. In fact, this reverie was also prompted by the death this week of Donald “Buz” Lukens, another right-wing hypocrite. He left Congress after he was caught on tape negotiating with — Kirk, correct me if I have the details wrong — the mother of a teenager he wanted to come over for some sexytime. As I recall he was fond of African-American girls, whom he would require to wear fluffy white bathrobes.

Again, the wags and goofs and talk-show hosts gathered at the trough for a heaping pile of slops. My favorite was the classified ad that ran deep in the Dispatch real-estate listings, for a piece of property close to a middle school, touted as a BUZ LUKENS SPECIAL. May God bless all classified-ad takers and their dear, dim dictation. I’m sure after the first week, it’s all Xs and Os.

When I was in college, registered to vote in Athens, it was some guy named Clarence Miller. All I know about him is, he didn’t court the student vote.

I’m probably forgetting somebody, but these are certainly the lowlights. As an American, I hope to someday have the experience of sending someone to Washington whom I feel represented by, someone who, if they don’t share my beliefs, at least understands them. Where do I have to move, guys?

Some quick bloggage today, because I have to start the errand mambo in mere moments:

Jon Carroll salutes the police blotter at the Arcata Eye again:

“Thursday, April 15 9:21 a.m. A TransAm’s inherent awesomeness was kicked up a significant notch with an impressive burnout demonstration (a symbolic representation of the young buffoon’s ever-so-agile sperm motility, though he likely wasn’t thinking about that, or much else) at Sunset and Western avenues. But the display of reproductive prowess took a humiliating plummet when the mouth-breathermobile slammed into a fire hydrant, unleashing a prematurely orgasmic fountain of wa-wa.”

And so on. (You know, a TransAm does have inherent awesomeness. More than a Prius, anyway. You Californians, always harshin’ the domestic product.)

You know, at the military academies’ graduations, when the graduates all throw their hats in the air? I always wondered how they went about retrieving them. Turns out they don’t.

And now I am off.

I’ve been watching this Rand Paul story unfold for the past few days, and combined with the Mark Souder news, it mostly serves to remind me of my time as a Hoosier. The Wall Street Journal broke the news gently to its readership, whom you’d think would already be familiar with the type:

Republican candidate Rand Paul’s controversial remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act unsettled GOP leaders this week, but they reflect deeply held iconoclastic beliefs held by some in his party, and many in the tea-party movement, that the U.S. government shook its constitutional moorings more than 70 years ago.

Seventy years ago? Visit Indiana, gents! I once heard someone there say, with an expression of delicate pain on his fair brow, that it might have been better for the nation to shake off slavery “naturally,” rather than fight a war over it. In his explanation, the Confederacy would gradually come to its senses, while the invisible hand worked its magic, and little by little, state by state, the south would shed the peculiar institution, and we wouldn’t have had to spill a drop of blood over it. Except for that of the slaves who would have had to stay in bondage, that is.

“So if Mississippi, say, hung on until 1950 or so, that would have been OK?” I asked, wondering for the millionth time what happened to the nice, reasonable Republicans of my youth. Yes, it would be OK. In the long run.

I don’t mean to pick on Indiana. It’s just where I was at the time. I’m sure there are Randites everywhere in this great country. But now they’ve been dragged into the spotlight, and it’s a little unsettling for them.

Libertarians — or constitutional conservatives, or whatever Paul and his ilk are calling themselves these days — aren’t accustomed to this much attention. Generally, they confine their pontificating to blog comment sections, the dinner table and maybe the men’s grille at the country club, where they’re not going to face much opposition. Libertarianism isn’t so much a party as it is a philosophy, and being one means never having to say “so help me God” on swearing-in day, so you’re free to have any old crazy opinion you want. Let’s legalize all drugs! Let’s open the national parks to logging and mining! Let’s do away with zoning! Let’s carry guns everywhere!

Some of these ideas aren’t completely whack. Take the drug thing. I’m certainly in favor of calling off the war on (some) drugs and treating abuse and addiction as a public-health problem, rather than one for law enforcement. But ask a libertarian what we’re going to do with all the junkies, more of which will surely be created when there is no legal sanction whatsoever for using everything from marijuana to heroin, and they wave their hands. Details, details. Not their problem.

I’ve said in the past that being a Libertarian always strikes me as a political version of one of those role-playing games where your capabilities are determined by a dice roll — OK, I’m 10 feet tall, can fly and shoot fireballs out of my fingertips, but I’m allergic to water. Limit the government to police work, military and a few other functions, and nothing bad happens (to them), only good, wonderful, free-market things.

The NYT, Sunday, lays out the problem in a nutshell:

But Mr. Paul’s position is complicated. He has emerged as the politician most closely identified with the Tea Party movement. Its adherents are drawn to him because he has come forward as a kind of libertarian originalist, unbending in his anti-government stance. The farther he retreats from ideological purity, the more he resembles other, less attractive politicians.

In this sense, Mr. Paul’s quandary reflects the position of the Tea Partiers, whose antipathy to government, rooted in populist impatience with the major parties, implies a repudiation of politics and its capacity to effect meaningful change.

Sooner or later, everyone with strongly held opinions about public policy comes up on the hard, unbending truth about how we make it in this country, i.e., politics: It’s always a matter of compromise, of negotiation. The clear, pure air of theory belongs in universities, editorial-board meetings and the men’s grille at the country club, where you can mourn Lester Maddox to your heart’s content.

That NYT story is pretty good. Recommended.

Meanwhile, back in Indiana, Souder the Goober gave his exclusive farewell interview, to the Journal Gazette. It’s an instructive look at the way some people interact with their personal God:

“Subconsciously, was I wanting to get caught? Or was God so frustrated with me he said, ‘I’ve had it. You’re so stupid here I’m going to, in effect, out you.’

“It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. Because ultimately maybe I was getting – and she was getting – so reckless that it was a way for God to say, ‘You need to get your marriages back together. You need to get your lives straightened out.’ Maybe it was also guilt.

“Or maybe it was just an accident because we were really stupid, and God used it. But at the end of the day, if we get through all this, we’ll be better for having gotten caught.”

This is one reason I found it pretty easy to leave God behind. The Almighty just talks to these folks differently than he ever talked to me. (Or to Jesus, for that matter. As I recall my Scripture, the response to “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was silence.) Such a micromanager, this God, messing with people’s car batteries and sending DNR officers to interrupt makeout sessions in state parks.

Ah. Well, it’s all over now, baby blue. Back to civilian life with him, and off to my Monday chore-a-whirl for me. Have a good one y’selves, all.

Just the one thing today, because I fear that, like the New Orleans-loving national media, this blog has totally ignored the suffering of Nashville, which came through its floods without destroying a football stadium, and, and…

OK, reset: One of our own was left more or less homeless by the flood, and he has a video camera, not to mention TV news experience.

You can start Basset’s flood journey here, and follow the right-hand menu to the other parts of his video flood coverage. Cousin, I’m here to tell you, they got flooded. Stand at your front door and hold your hand as high as your head. That’s how much water they took. Much love and support to you, Basset, whatever that means, and best of luck on your rebuilding.

And have a good weekend, all. I know what Basset will be doing. Me, I hope to catch up on some sleep.

A couple of days on one topic, and the bloggage piles up. So let’s hop to it, shall we? There’s some good stuff here:

First, the Palin family continues to stain the nation’s carpets as young Bristol mama-sees-mama-does herself into a potentially lucrative career as a public speaker. Her fee is said to be somewhere between $15K-$30K, depending on “what she has to do to prepare” to speak on such topics as abstinence claptrap and anti-abortion claptrap. Hey, you know what index cards cost these days? Sorry, that’s editorializing. I’m choosing not to be upset by this, as the sorts of groups who would pay such a fee very likely need to be separated from their money somehow. Also, Bristol needs to start her five-school college education odyssey one of these days, and needs the bucks for tuition. My only regret is, this increases the chances we’ll see her on regular old non fee-paying media. One more reason to confine my media consumption to NPR exclusively.

Also, the don’t-make-fun-of-public-figures’-families rule no longer applies. Not that it stopped anyone, but good lord, when you ask for it like this…

The people who came up with the Bacon Explosion evidently have Google alerts, because I was copied on their e-mail notification that they have sampled the KFC Double Down sandwich, found it lacking, and monkeyed with it. How? By adding a slice of Bacon Explosion, sillypants. Taste test and many photographs here.

I’m a sucker for a certain kind of liberal patriotism, and this story, about the United Nations of Hamtramck High preparing for its senior prom, touched me. DetNews columnist Neal Rubin calls Hamtramck “absurdly diverse,” and it is, more diverse than an after-school special:

“You tell ’em, ‘It’s something seniors do,’ ” says Mohamed Algehaim, 18, the class secretary. He was born here, but his parents are from Yemen, and the part about the tuxedo took some work, too.

“If you’re the first child, it’s harder to get across,” says Emina Alic, 18, the Bosnia-born class president. “If your brothers and sisters already went, your parents tell you you’re going.”

The 200 current seniors had read the memo early on. “There’s competition between classes,” says class historian Sabbir Noor, 17, whose roots go back to Bangladesh…

Throw in the Poles who still live in the old neighborhood, the African Americans who moved there in their own flight from Detroit and the rest of the ethnic fruit salad, and you get a sense of the place.

Moving on, a few couples who will not want to hyphenate their names.

Finally, it can be told: This is the project I’ve been working on since January, the 75th anniversary book for the Detroit Economic Club. It’s a custom-publishing job, i.e., work-for-hire, but it was really interesting and I count myself lucky to have gotten the gig. The DEC is a noontime speaker’s club, but one of the most sought-after podiums in the country, and lemme tell you, they have heard from everyone. (Except the Palin family.) I had full access to their archive at the Detroit Public Library, and it was pretty cool, going through files of correspondence with letters from people like Richard Nixon and Henry Ford II. The story of Detroit in the 20th century was the story of America, and it was fascinating to see who came to town and what they had to say when they got here. It certainly left me with some new ideas about how we learn history.

Anyway, the anniversary celebration starts tonight, I have to write about it for the book, and I need to throw together an outfit that won’t disgrace me in front of the movers and shakers. Both the News and Freep did stories pegged to it.

I also have an early meeting tomorrow morning, so this may have to serve for the week’s blogging. One question I leave you with: Where’s Coozledad? He hasn’t spoken up for a few days. Did he get kicked by a mule?

The thing is, Mark Souder is — how to put this? — unattractive.

Which is not to say he’s ugly. No one’s rushing to carve him in marble, but on the grand continuum of looks, he falls somewhere in the middle, like nearly all of us. If middle age should hold any consolation, it should be that we’re no longer judged on our hawtness quotient. Anyway, I’ve known many objectively homely people who prosper sexually, and I bet you have, too. Good looks isn’t all it takes to be attractive.

Let’s not discuss what Mark Souder looks like today, because really, that has nothing to do with his unattractiveness.

He does not, in the strictest sense of the word, make one want to draw near. Politicians should have at least a modicum of charm, and Souder has none. In my opinion, anyway, which you should maybe discount, because he was elected once and comfortably re-elected six more times, so obviously somebody liked him. But everything about him, to me, just…grated.

He was a right-wing, family-values Christian elected during the 1994 GOP sweep, back in the Newt Gingrich/Contract With America days. He said from the beginning he believed in term limits (the whole Class of ’94 did, remember?) and wouldn’t run for more than three. When it came time to walk the talk, he reneged, saying the census had redrawn his district, so the pledge was nullified. He lost some supporters then, but not enough.

And even if I weren’t inclined to despise him for his politics, there were his campaign ads. In years when he wasn’t being seriously challenged (most of them), he bought up chunks of talk-radio ad space in the fall, and he’d deliver these 30-second cornball sermonettes, in his unattractive, Porky Piggish voice, about the lessons he learned as a boy growing up in Grabill — hard work, faith, family, etc. In what should have been an early hypocrisy alert, it should be noted that when Souder grew up and could live anywhere, he chose not to live in Grabill.

Grabill is a small town in suburban Fort Wayne, Amish, very conservative, that has in recent years thrown in with agri-tourism, in that there are many antique stores and olde-tyme shopping opportunities. Chief among them is Souder’s General Store, run by guess-who’s family, where you can buy penny candy and Amish clothing and the like. The story goes that Souder became a conservative when, as a teenager, he helped with payroll and was appalled at how much the government required they withhold from employee checks. He was, however, also a member of the Apostolic Christian Church, one step to the left of Mennonites and traditionally pacifist. This gave young Mark the best of both worlds — bedrock conservatism and an open-and-shut case for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War.

But guess where he stood on the invasion of Iraq? Shock and awe, bitches! You can see, perhaps, why I find him so deeply unattractive.

(I covered a lot of this territory a couple years ago, here. Read if you’re so inclined.)

As his time in Congress lengthened and his seniority gave him more power, he used it for some frankly awful ends. He’s in favor of the endless drug war, and is author of the Drug-Free Student Loan Amendment, which bars federal financial aid for any student convicted of a drug charge, down to simple possession of marijuana. (He claims it was misinterpreted by the evil Clinton administration, and was only supposed to apply to students so convicted while in college. Oh.) He’s one of those northern-state congressmen who likes to chastise Texans who don’t want to build a giant fence with an accompanying army on their southern border. He’s pro-intelligent design, anti-gay marriage — you know the drill. I see via his website that he’s also opposed to online video poker. Hallelujah, there’s something we can agree on.

He’s also pro-abstinence education, but I’ll leave the chuckling over that to the folks at TPM.

I have to say this: Of all the things I thought might bring Souder down someday, sex is the last thing I would have considered. Money, yes. Sex, no. He’s just not attractive enough. Again, set aside his looks and tell me, what part of this man’s personality, style, affect would be attractive to any woman? Does he seem like the kind of guy who can tell a good story, even a good joke? Do you get the sense all his time in the corridors of power has left him with even a modicum of sophistication, someone you wouldn’t mind being seated next to at a dinner party?

The most interesting thing I ever read about the man came not long after his election, when the Contract With America was proceeding through Congress, and it came time to cut arts funding, so that no museum would ever display another Robert Mapplethorpe photograph again. Souder, I read, was having second thoughts; he’d recently started learning French horn, and was being taught by a member of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. He was troubled to learn that slashing arts funding would hurt a lot more orchestras and children’s theater groups than it would gay photographers and the curators who loved them. Now that’s something I could have talked about with the guy, but when the time came? He voted with the herd. So much for the arts broadening a man.

I think I’ve read too many novels, because when these things happen, when powerful men take proactive steps that they know hold the seeds of their destruction, I want to get inside their heads. Why, Tim Goeglein? Why, Mark Souder? Why, in one’s 50s, when the hot blood of youth has cooled considerably, does one take up with a married woman? She’s no hot-fudge sundae of erotic possibilities, just your basic cute northeast Indiana Republican hausfrau, with a bit more polish than the ones you see shopping at the mall in Christmas sweaters. Maybe, like a lot of guys who fall well short of the George Clooney looks standard, he thought that he would never again find a woman other than his wife willing to go to bed with him, and decided not to deprive himself of the experience. Or maybe he was, like Mark Sanford, actually in love.

But here’s the thing these guys will never, ever understand: It doesn’t have to be this way. We’re all adults here. We know how hard it is to stay married, particularly when you’re separated from your family all week. Everybody’s human, and we all have feet of clay. If you were a Democrat, you might have gotten away with this. (At least, at this writing. The reports are saying this fling would have landed him before the House ethics panel, which suggests it was more than a little slap-and-tickle between adults.) They don’t get that all that family-values crap is a double-edged sword, and if you live by it, you can die by it, too.

Or maybe he’s not that complicated at all. From his statement:

It has been a privilege to be a part of the battle for freedom and the values we share.

Apparently he sees himself as a warrior, too. And that “share” part? Whaddaya mean “we,” white man? I don’t cheat on my husband.

In honor of this happy day, a bloggage fest of Soudernalia:

Souder equates consensual teen sex to date rape.

The youthful indiscretion had been going on six (!!!!) years (!!!!!!!). Trysting spots were public parks, probably because he couldn’t afford a $50 Red Roof Inn room on a congressman’s salary. The rumors were hot and heavy, which I have to assume means much of the Fort Wayne media knew about it. His paramour, “a strawberry blonde, also worked as a Mary Kay cosmetics consultant and is married to a successful homebuilder and Kosciusko County Commissioner. On Facebook, where she maintained a profile, she routinely sent high-fives to Souder — clicking “Like” –when he posted his congressional activities on his page.” All of which I had to learn from the Washington Post. (I expect a weaselly Kevin Leininger column by the end of the week, full of Scripture and admonishments not to judge, etc. And that will be the end of it.)

But let’s luxuriate in it while we can, eh? And now, I click a big Like for all of you, and turn it over to the snark.

The TV season is winding down, and before it does, I want to throw a little love at “Breaking Bad,” the other show airing at 10 p.m. Sunday. I’m working then, but that’s why God made DVRs. Like “Treme,” “Breaking Bad” rewards second and third viewings, although it’s not what you’d call nuanced or subtle. The story of a 50-year-old high-school chemistry teacher who decides to take up methamphetamine production could easily become a cartoon, but in its third season seems to have hit its stride as a sort of waking nightmare of evil’s effects on those who choose it.

Walter White tells himself he got into meth-making as a way to leave his family financially staked for life without him — he’s diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in the pilot episode — but as his condition improved and the cancer went into remission, which it had to do if the show was to have more than one or two seasons, the tone shifted and Walt began to grasp the dimensions of the monster he’d loosed into the world. Bodies began to fall. His partner, a hapless man-child aptly named Jesse Pinkman, fell victim to all manner of misery, from heroin addiction to the O.D. death of his girlfriend. The climax of last season was the mid-air collision, a mile or two above Walt’s house, of two commercial aircraft, an accident caused by a distracted air-traffic controller. Who was? The father of Jesse’s dead girlfriend. His attention wandered when a bit of radio traffic used her name in a transmission: Tango Delta Jane two oh three…

This season, the stain is spreading, and reaching closer to Walt’s immediate family. His wife, Skyler, now knows where the money came from, but she’s unmoved by his motivation, and has left him, along with their teenage son and newborn daughter. The latest victim is his brother-in-law Hank, a DEA agent who fell victim to a pair of identical-twin Mexican assassins gunning for Hank, and…

This is sounding ridiculous, I know, but it isn’t. Or rather, it uses its made-for-TV improbabilities well enough that you don’t find yourself rolling your eyes. If I have one criticism of the narrative as it’s unfolded, it’s the abandonment of one of the most interesting themes of season one — the crumminess of a certain middle-class American life, and how one living it can be so easily seduced by money, i.e., a way out of it. Walt’s very survival is threatened because his health insurance doesn’t cover the good chemo drugs. He and his wife attend a birthday party for a college friend of Walt’s, also a chemist, whose path took a different turn, and who lives in lavish splendor. The friend offers Walt a job at his company (with much better health insurance) out of pity, concealing it well, but Walt figures it out. The shame and humiliation such a gesture inspires in the one it’s bestowed upon is a difficult emotion for an actor to summon. But Bryan Cranston does.

The producers are starting to circle around back to it, a little bit. Now that Skyler knows there’s almost a million dollars in cash in a duffel bag in her crawl space, she’s starting to think about its implications. The scene where she walks into her lover’s bathroom and glories in the radiant floor heating was priceless. The things money can buy! (Although if I were her, I’d start with a kitchen reno. Her kitchen is almost gloriously ugly. But at this point, she might as well just buy a new house. Torch the kitchen. Remove the duffel bag from the premises first.)

I hope they continue in this vein. Identical-twin Mexican assassins can only take you so far. Although, sooner or later, the violence and misery has to reach Walt himself. He’s dodged so many bullets, many of them literal, that delaying it will soon be counterproductive. He made a big decision early on that sets everything in motion, and another one this season to keep it that way. But until he loses a finger or a child, it hasn’t cost him enough.

One final thing: I’m struck, watching this show, by its depiction of masculinity. I mentioned Jesse was a man-child, although he’s becoming more of a man. (He’s shed the overgrown baby clothes favored by so many young men these days, anyway. And the loss of the child isn’t doing him any favors.) Walt’s sense of himself as a failed father, husband and provider — especially the latter — is what made him start down this tragic path. Hank, the DEA agent, is a macho cartoon. So far, the most fully integrated man is Gustavo Fring, the kingpin mastermind played by Giancarlo Esposito. Calm, cool, ruthless — just a little more seductiveness and he’d be the devil himself.

We’ll see what happens to Walt & Co. before the month is up. (I think.) Please, no more plane crashes.

And now I must skedaddle. Although I’m sure the Hoosiers among you would rather talk about MARK SOUDER’S RESIGNATION?!??? A SEX scandal? Someone wanted to SLEEP with him? I have just fainted.

Saturday was opening night for “Tosca” at the Detroit Opera House, and it’s a tossup what was more entertaining — the Puccini or the people-watching. Fortunately, there were two intermissions.

Women in floor-length dresses, weird party frocks with bubble hems and mink off-the-shoulder necklines, anything black, Lucite necklaces, pearls, bling. (And Botox. Shiny face was everywhere.) Men in black tie, regular tie, T-shirts, shaved heads and mohawks. One hot tranny-ish mess, well over six feet, in towering silver stripper heels and strapless satin dress, hair the color of cherry Kool-Aid.

Opera fans. Who knew?

“Tosca” was very enjoyable. I can’t speak with much authority, as it’s only the second opera I’ve seen performed. The first was at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Bizet’s “Carmen.” As I recall, the singing was fine, but the company was so impoverished the staging was minimal, not much more than a bare stage. Add to that the book (French) and the supertitles (Spanish), and it was, literally, pretty much all blah-blah to me.

Supertitles gave opera a second wind when they were introduced in the 1980s. I’m sure there’s some purist out there who disapproves, but I’m not one of them. I don’t speak Italian, German or French, and my music education was spotty enough that I need and appreciate a little help.

“Tosca” is pretty accessible, though; it’s Italian, the music is glorious, the plot a simple matter of jealousy, political oppression, betrayal, rape (attempted), murder, tragedy and suicide. What’s not to like? And when Tosca pours out her heart —

Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore,
non feci mai male ad anima viva!

(I lived for art, I lived for love,
Never did I harm a living soul!)

— who can’t sympathize?

That was Saturday. Sunday brought the redemption our recession-battered state needs. Break out the hummus and kebabs, Miss Michigan was named Miss USA.

Hummus? Yes. Miss Michigan is Arab-American, a nice Lebanese girl from Dearborn, Rima Fakih. Reportedly she’s Shi’ite Muslim. The photos of her in her un-burka alone will likely keep her father up at night, for fear of both a fatwa and Donald Trump, come a-courting with his tongue hanging out. She is, how you young men say? Smokin’.

Seriously, however, this backgrounder on Fakih from the Freep is a pretty good picture of this community, its contradictions and, for want of a better word, diversity. She grew up in Queens and moved to Michigan seven years ago. The story mentions her being in high school when 9/11 happened — a Catholic school. In other words, Miss USA is a pretty American girl.

However! Already the far-right carping has begun. Roy has the roundup. Ahem:

Tonight, they celebrated and laughed at us from within at Dearbornistan’s Hezbollah restaurant, La Pita, where workers openly sing Hezbollah war songs and anti-Semitic “ditties” in the kitchen. It was the site of Fakih’s victory party, where falafel, and hummus, and hate were all on the menu, as they usually are there and throughout Fakih’s community.

Falafel, hummus and hate were on the menu. I’m going to write that one down.

I suspect, at the end of all this, Fakih will take her big pile of dough, spend it on law school tuition, and maybe, insh’allah, meet the author of the above passage in court someday. Now that’s something I’d like to see on prime-time television.

Not to crash the mood too much, but a little bikini news was welcome after the far more tragic incident earlier in the weekend, in which police executing a no-knock warrant in Detroit accidentally shot and killed a 7-year-old girl. More will be revealed on this one, no doubt; the current official version is that the first person police encountered tussled with them in some way, causing the gun to go off. I’m withholding judgment, but Jesus Christ, no-knock warrants? Flash-bang grenades? Note this detail:

Outside the home, the department’s special response team was prepared to go in. Film crews with A&E’s “The First 48” reality show, which follows police departments nationwide during the crucial 48 hours after a homicide is committed, were taping the team for a documentary. Police spokesman John Roach said the tapes will be reviewed as part of the investigation.

I’m sure that had nothing to do with the decision to go in like gangbusters, right?

We’ll see. In the meantime, I have Monday to get into gear, and an aria to sing in the shower.