Reports of Ross Perot's sanity may be exaggerated, but he hasn't lost his value as a tribal elder. In the recent colloquy with Larry King on the state of President Clinton's mental health, the feisty Texan and the Brooklyn blowhard got into a phrenological discussion that resembled an aboriginal creation myth:
Perot: When we smell something we don't smell until in our heart tells what it is.
King: The heart is pumping. The brain ...
Perot: The heart, breathing, learning to move. Now, brain learns, when we were very small we couldn't walk. The brain learned how to let us walk. Then if you're an acrobatic, the brain learned how to let you do all kinds of tricks.
King: But the brain gave us obsessions, and it gave us bad things. It gave us torment, it gave us difficulty, it gave us conflict. All of those things. I don't mean to interrupt you.
Perot: No, no, no. That's great. That's all part of life, see?
But pundits who laugh their talking heads off at Perot's return to the monkey house have short memories (as, apparently, does Perot, who seems to forget that his single '92 campaign plank -- balancing the budget -- is the one civic goal Bill Clinton has actually achieved). The colorful billionaire has always had an ability to give voice to lobotomized public discontent, and his new Clinton-bashing poll is a case in point. The poll's not-very-surprising results reveal that the Perotistas are almost unanimous in their determination to cut the president loose, and that anywhere from one-fourth to two-thirds of them are eligible to receive Modern Maturity. Very funny -- until we recall that these irate geezers are the people who actually get out and vote. And with even bigger wackos around to do the real anti-Clinton spadework, the Reform Party's reluctant leader may once again have the last laugh. As always where Perot is concerned, our advice is twofold: Bow down before Oz the Great, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Digital Fishwrap
This week's long-awaited Web debut by Newsweek magazine reopens old questions about the economics of publishing on the Web. Until now, the argument against offering shovelware online has usually boiled down to a simple matter of "Why buy the ink when the bull is free?" A quick survey of subscription rates, though, gives the lie to that contention. Time magazine, the Web version of which has been available at no cost since at least, what, 1936, offers a yearly subscription at a steep rate of US$39.95. Despite an unwillingness to haggle, Time's circulation has been up in the past year or so. Newsweek, which until now has been available online only to America Online customers, thus seemingly better positioned to charge for its services, feels the need to undercut its competitor substantially, with a one-year print rate of $24 even. Which proves what should have been obvious: Because the only time we actually read the all-but-indistinguishable magazines is when we're sitting on the throne, we base our buying decisions solely on price and absorbency. That they're available digitally matters not a whit. The Wall Street Journal manages to charge $89 a year, while undercutting itself by some $40 on the Web. The less-valuable Economist, with large chunks of its lofty-sounding flapdoodle available free of charge online, still gets away with a wallet-flattening price tag of $49.90 for 23 issues. And so on. The digital Slate carries an eminently reasonable $19.95 yearly subscription, which hasn't hurt the various Harvard alumni newsletters with which it competes for eyeballs. And those publications that stick to the baseline price of $0.00 have had little impact on their pay-per-spew competitors. So the big question remains: How does the market decide what to charge for newspaper and magazine subscriptions? We await the answer from some learned circulation manager, while strongly suspecting that the answer will be: "Oh, those are just some numbers I pulled out of my ass."
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
We wonder, though, if Newsweek.com was sending a secret signal by calling its "Crash of '99?" piece a "hyper cover story." Reading one End-Is-Nigh cover story after another is making us wonder if financial journalists know what a self-fulfilling prophecy is. In any event, Newsweek and the rest were scooped two months ago by the Weekly World News, which went so far as to predict a worldwide depression with over a "billion homeless, starving in the streets" by mid-October. It's not the first time the News has gotten the news before all the fancy-pants economists out there. Never before has buying the rumor seemed like such a smart move. We'll believe this death-of-the-economy stuff when we read about it in the Drudge Report.
Technosophism
Writing the official obituary of Technorealism -- a phenomenon most of us didn't even know was healthy -- barely rises to the level of a "somebody's gotta do it" task. But somebody had to do it. The movement's almost instantaneous collapse under the weightlessness of its own hot air was frankly terrifying, but we're happy to report that, six months down the road, a hearty handful of Technorealists have survived and banded together to build all-new castles in the air. TV, the papers, and the Washington think tanks may have bailed out, but on the Web, the show about nothing goes on.
Cartoon Frogs
A spam this week from J. P. Mac at Cool to be Canadian -- requesting that we "Be, Buy, and Boost Canadian!" -- seems to be some direct tweak of Suck's xenophobia. But among all the shots taken at English, German, or Australian fans, perceptive readers may have detected a habit of going easy on the French. This show of respect goes beyond mere fondness for Bordeaux, Le Monde, or Cinderfella. The French are a notoriously unwired bunch, and likely to remain so, given Minitel's seeming inability to reinvent itself as an ass-first ISP in the AOL mode. Frankly, it's not much fun mocking people who don't know you exist. More to the point though, all that time off the Internet seems to be good for the national intellect. French bande dessinée artist Stephane Heuet recently issued a comic-book version of Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and the hardbound graphic novel has been a réussite éclatante, selling out its entire first printing. Frankly, we still believe Americans could have done a better version of Proust's titanic masterwork -- Swann as a square-jawed Joe Kubert figure, a flawlessly curvy Odette in the Sue Storm mode, maybe a goggle-eyed Peter Bagge version of the foppish M. de Charlus. But more to the point, has any Classic Comics warhorse ever been a bestseller on this side of the pond? You have to respect that kind of populiteracy. Maybe NBC's telemovie version of Crime and Punishment will be a surprise ratings success, but until then, we can only say Vive la France!
Stalking Pete Wilson
"Under this bill," California governor Pete Wilson announced last week, "the so-called stalkerazzi will be deterred from driving their human prey to distraction or even death." And, in fact, many celebrities have been killed, some seriously. We can't fault Wilson -- whose legislative agenda these days seems to consist of supporting the fight against Indian casinos and rearranging the California primary to bolster his own doomed presidential campaign -- for latching onto an issue popular with the Golden State's numerous famous types. But the signs of stalking are often subtler than the law can account for. And let's face it: How long would the celebrity class survive without its colony of intrusive varmints in tow? Unless you're one of that growing number of people who have been rescued from certain death by Tom Cruise, you still have more to fear from kooky celebrities than they have to fear from you.
