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It's not easy being a hurricane victim. You lose your house, you lose your family, you end up 50 miles out to sea, and still you have to face the devastating onslaught of do-gooder US ex-presidents.
Central-American survivors of Hurricane Mitch spent much of this week at the tender mercies of Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush, prompting hemisphere-wide expressions of gratitude toward Gerald Ford for staying home and nodding off to NFL Films highlight reels.
The two chiefs, whose services were politely declined by US voters back in the day, managed to bring their personae intact to the area below the free trade zone: Carter made gloomy predictions about Mitch recovery efforts in ominous national-malaise terms, and Bush hinted darkly that beleaguered Español speakers might be forced to sneak into some perfectly fine US states such as the one Bush's own heir apparent governs (until a better offer comes along).
President Bush really outdid himself with a photo op in which he described how a car carrying himself and Honduran President Carlos Flores Facusse was approached by an elderly peasant who told the VIPs a searing tale of woe that seemed to go on for about 15 minutes. In Bush's telling, the old man related how his own home and livelihood had been wiped out but still managed to get in a ringing endorsement of personal initiative and the free market. In a heartwarming epilogue, the speaker was allowed to finish his speech before getting dragged off and murdered by a CIA-trained death squad.
Whether it was early holiday spirit or a secret visit to Wall Street by the Colombian air force, Tuesday's run-up in Net stocks made John Glenn's low-protein star voyage seem tame by comparison. A flood that lifts all boats -- seaworthy or not -- can be cause for concern, but there is immeasurable entertainment value in watching short-selling Rumpelstiltskins vent their anger at the free market.
Traders betting against eBay lost big, and unfortunately, they lived to tell about it. Yahoo's message boards have been ringing with complaints against the "criminals" who like to see stocks go up rather than down -- not to mention suicide threats from eBay shorters and attendant expressions of sympathy, or lack of same. We don't like to see anybody go bust, but really, as injured parties go, short sellers have about as much claim to innocence as suicide bombers and trepans. Some bets are clearly better than others, but when you've been naughty all year, you can't very well complain about that lump of coal in your stocking. Largely lost amidst the cannibalization of Newt and the wholly synthetic rise of snooze-worthy Robert Livingston was the Republican National Committee's announcement that Philly is back again, as the site of the party's convention in Summer 2000. "America's Mayor," the flirty, Teflon-coated, corned beef-chomping Ed Rendell, had been promiscuously lobbying for both parties to sport a little Philadelphia feeling, and with the GOP committed, it should be an interesting scene.
When the conservatives come marching into town, they will see what Rendell has accomplished by stealing plays from their own playbook, like challenging the city's unions and brown-nosing the Chamber of Commerce. They may also fall victim to the state law precluding Philadelphia from passing its own gun laws, thus making the City of Brotherly Love the only major US site where gun crimes are actually increasing.
On a more personal level, certain Republicans may find themselves, like so many Philadelphians, loving Rendell, whose shiksa wife seems to be sneaking pounds of Dietz and Watson scrapple into his diet, so when he celebrates the summer opening of the public swimming pools by cannonballing his hirsute ass into the deep end, he grosses out the Philly press corps in the process. Some Republicans may even find that the roving Rendell brings out their own inner Henry Hyde.
We're not too impressed with Bush the Son, the GOP's own flirty, likely 2000 candidate and charmer. In our opinion, only Steve Largent has that combination of poise and gravity that seems to shout, "I'm the Republican Al Gore." But if George W. and "Fast" Eddie buddy up, they might consider visiting what will no doubt be a popular tourist spot for the family values-preaching conventioneers: Delilah's Den, an upscale titty bar off Spring Garden Street. There, at least one employee was enchanting enough to inspire another professional man with a straying eye -- except in that case the result was homicide, not just adultery. Hidden beneath 80 years worth of rock sediment, the DNA of the Lost Generation has been rediscovered at last in a jar of bathtub gin and reverse-engineered into a Spielbergian behemoth. If the first sign of a Gilded Age revival was packed into Leonardo DiCaprio's retro, waterlogged trousers, conclusive evidence that early-century revivalism was headed for a rally came in the form of the chorus of voices a few months back, predicting an imminent, 1929-style market crash.
These days, we only need browse the better-stocked newsstands in town to shore up memories of our great-grandparents' senility fodder. Just the other day, we were forced to choose between the first issue of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, named after -- you guessed it! -- a deceased, long-forgotten old-timer, and the latest issue of Baffler, featuring numerous pieces of clip art drawn by and depicting deceased, long-forgotten old-timers.
While both "journals" make a show of appropriating both the octavo size and austerely clusterfucked design of the little magazines of the '20s -- The Smart Set, The American Mercury, Transition, The Little Review, et al. -- McSweeney's appeared to come closer to evoking the perennially evoked spirit of H. L. Mencken, though the few pages of Baffler's Mid-Cult spectacular we were able to browse evinced a rare talent for precisely nailing the uptown radicalism of the turn-of-the-century New Republic. Had we been spending anyone's money but our own, the sound impulse would have been to buy both of these young-fogey masterpieces, pedal our penny farthings to the nearest plaza, fasten our monocles atop our cheeks, and dig in.
But as with all our most irrationally exuberant and drunken inclinations, we find a Depression-era approach to consumption keeps us most honest.
