There were so many reasons to be happy about Tuesday's election results -- the approval of medical-marijuana ballot measures by three new states, the prospect of never again seeing Al D'Amato's face or hearing Lauch Faircloth's unwieldy name, the fact that both D'Amato and Faircloth were picked to win in ABC's now-infamous election soothsaying -- that we almost missed the day's most enjoyable spectacle: seeing CNN correspondent Jeanne Meserve wrinkle her nose while trying to explain Jesse "The Body" Ventura's surprise pile-driving victory in the Minnesota governor's race.
The Gopher State's own WWF legend and former Navy SEAL benefited, Meserve explained, from support by "male, younger ... less educated voters." Of course, regular readers of Hit and Run weren't surprised. Indeed, while our projection of a Ventura victory back in September probably won't earn us those talking-head jobs we've been coveting these many years, we'd like the record to show that Suck's election predictions appear to be more accurate than Peter Jennings'.
There's nothing like a proposed ban on cockfighting to bring out the senile loon in all of us. However, our favorite ballot initiative of the week was neither Arizona's nor Missouri's rooster protection act but California's Proposition 6, which sought to outlaw the possession, transfer, or receipt of horses for slaughter for human consumption. Squeezing Trigger for dog food is still OK. The initiative enjoyed support from the Horse Whisperer himself, and if Robert Redford's involvement in the campaign surprised his fellow humans, it was long expected by the horses, who, it turns out, were the only viewers of Redford's last movie.
Against that kind of star power, the anti-6 campaign, launched by an organization called Just Say Neigh, never really stood a chance. California horses can now lead full and productive lives, free from the fear of being eaten by vengeful Christopher Reeve types. California stars have similar leeway, as Rob "Meathead" Reiner showed by throwing his weight behind a statewide cigarette-tax proposal. We're reaching a crisis point in the West. California's abundance of confusing ballot initiatives combined with its surfeit of washed-up, underemployed stars is creating a brutal, Morton's-centered rule by fiat. Even the Golden State is only big enough for one horse whisperer -- and apparently too small for any horse eaters. The New York Times fussbudget William Safire has declared this week's Thomas Jefferson bombshell a Cochran-esque DNA conspiracy designed to sexonerate Bill Clinton. Intentional or not, the news does recall a sly dig President Reagan made against candidate Clinton before shuffling off to his earthly shadow world. "You're no Thomas Jefferson," the Gipper declared in 1992. That line now has some unintentional resonance.
After all, which would be more defensible on Judgment Day: spouting crabby racist theorems while making slaves of your own children or fumbling toward an absurd orgasm while holding a boring national conversation on race? Sure, Clinton's straining efforts to transfer a measly 13.1 percent of the West Bank suggest that the Louisiana Purchase would have been beyond his powers, but at least he hasn't bored the nation with ingeniously pointless household inventions.
And in the field of movie legacies -- the one issue that really matters -- the two presidents are neck and neck. While Clinton endured the ignominy of being portrayed by John Travolta in the civic bore Primary Colors, Jefferson's reputation was sullied by toad-like lummox Nick Nolte in the endless Jefferson in Paris. But the Founding Father has one last card up his ruffled sleeve. In the original play and movie versions of 1776, Jefferson was played by Ken Howard, the lovable hothead who went on to help pay off America's poisonous racial debt by setting inner-city kids straight on television's The White Shadow. At the moment, it seems that Jefferson still has the edge. But if Clinton puts in any more great performances on Black Entertainment Television, we may need a new face for Mount Rushmore. Let's face it. Suck has always been the online equivalent of The New Yorker: erudite, self-regarding, compulsively star-humping, appealing to just about anybody except that legendary cadre of little old ladies in Dubuque. Yet somehow, while the besieged behemoth of 43rd Street continues to generate buzz and career-making book deals, we remain typecast as the Tim Kazurinskys of the Web, preening to be noticed by a publishing elite that considers us about as noteworthy as Zwieback.
If Tuesday's Suck daily had some of the delightfully droll qualities of a Shouts and Murmurs piece from The New Yorker, that's because it spent a few days in the legendary magazine's editorial loop before we hijacked it for our own modest purposes. The deep-cover Suckster who penned the piece has produced volumes of Tilly-worthy prose over the years but had never collected anything from The New Yorker, except Xerox-generated rejection letters.
That is until last week, when our anonymous scribe crashed the glass ceiling by submitting an article under the alias of one of the magazine's superstar writers. Sure enough, we can now close the book on everyone's worst suspicion about the New York publishing scene: It's the byline, stupid. When the piece was sent to The New Yorker's clunky new email system under the alias bruce_mccall@cheerful.com, it received not the usual terse and tardy thanks-but-no-thanks but a speedy, gushing acceptance from Shouts and Murmurs editor Susan Morrison. (An invitation to lunch with Steve Martin only served to gild the lily.) We were tempted to shepherd this prank through to publication, if only to observe whether the real Bruce McCall would notice the unfamiliar article or merely accept the extra paycheck as a bonus for years of yeoman service.
But with the hoax complete, and The New Yorker's legal department on alert, the writer cut bait and made for a safe harbor. After all, such hi-jinks deserve neither to go unpublished nor unpunished. Of course, we're happy to have such stellar writing in our own pages, but we can't help feeling a little depressed at the degree to which a famous byline rates higher than the spew of words attached to it. It's just not fair that dustpans like Jon Stewart dine out at Cafe des Artistes on Si's dime, while Suck's eager-but-obscure commentary brigade appears doomed to a life of covering school-board meetings for the local Green Leaf. But if stealing the identities of famous writers hasn't helped us sneak into The New Yorker's Augean stable of literary stallions, we remain hopeful that it might add some brio to our own humble rag.
