Michele Bachmann's History Lesson

I was upset because Egpyt erupted into chaos and knocked off the State of the Union and the Republican and Tea Party rebuttals from the Sunday morning political shows. I wanted to hear Chris Matthews call Michele Bachmann a balloonhead again. And then there was Sarah Palin's sputnik moment when she conflated 30 years of history into one sweeping incident. Bachmann is really showing herself as an attention whore. She tried to get a major position in the Republican-led House. When they turned her down, she reached for another gambit--appointing herself head of the Tea Party and rewriter of American history.

The sad thing is the media is bypassing a perfectly legitimate concern of the Tea Party types--the deficit--and drowning it out by spending hours and hours concentrating on the fact that Bachmann looked into the wrong camera and gave a whacko interpretation of the last 300 years. I commented on it on the Huffington Post and some right-wing nut responded that the National Embarassment from Minnesota was technically right. Huh? In her speech in Iowa, Bachmann said the founding fathers worked tirelessly until slavery was eradicated. She specifically sited John Quincy Adams. First of all, JQ was not a Founding Father. His dad John Adams was. JQ was an anti-slavery advocate and did work to get slavery outlawed in the District of Columbia when he was a congressman, after losing his second term from President to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson--I loved the musical.

Maybe she saw Amistad and got confused. That was that movie with Anthony Hopkins as JQ Adams where he defends the hot model who was playing a slave who rebelled. Or maybe when she was a little girl, she watched The Adams Chronicles on PBS with William Daniels who played JQ. The same actor played the father John Adams in the stage and movie version of the musical 1776 and they did try to outlaw slavery in that show, but the mean old Southern representatives put a stop to it. But somehoe I doubt Bachmann saw 1776 on Broadway; maybe she saw the movie on the local Minnesota channel on the fourth of July.

Anyway, she made it sound like all the Founding Fathers worked to end slavery. Sorry, but they didn't. Some were against it, but the institution didn't end until the Civil War, several generations later. The FFs kept it in the constitution and counting slaves as three-fifths of a person was NOT a meaure to start on the road to equality, but to get the Southern states bigger representation in the Congress. Glenn Beck actually ranted on Chris Matthews for calling Bachmann an idiot. Beck actually said he thought Bachmann could become president. Now I know he's nuts.

Technology and Me: A Horror Story

I have a bizarre relationship with technology: it sometimes scares me. Everytime something goes wrong with my laptop or the TV or my digital camera or the clasp which keeps my sock cabinet closed, I panic. I worry that if I try to fix it, it will just get worse. To make anything work these days, you have to be a bloody electrical engineer. It's as if everyone should have a permenant IT team from India living in their apartment.

For example, my partner Jerry bought me a Sony Blu Ray player for Christmas. The whole point was so that we could stream Netflix live to our TV in Jackson Heights, Queens. Since the gift was mine, I volunteered to hook it up. Mistake. Well, the hooking up to the TV was not very difficult. We bought an HDMI cable and all you had to do was attach it to the TV and the Player. That was the easy part. Getting it hooked up to the Internet was the nightmare. It turns out you need a LAN adaptor--whatever that is--to get the internet. Best Buy and all the other chains were out of the LAN adaptor SONY made. Evidently there was a big rush after Christmas. At Walmart, they recommended something called the Netgear Universal Adaptor which supposedly works with every brand. The directions said you had to detach your router from your computer and hook up this universal adaptor to it to program it. I was frightened that if I removed the internet connection from the router, it would be lost and I would have spend 127 hours on the phone to India and I'd have to cut my own arm off like James Franco to get it to work again.

Fortunatley, I got it to work and everything turned out OK. But Netflix does not yet have its entire enormous inventory available for direct streaming to your TV. It did have Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Rocky and Bullwinkle.

I'm also having problems with my Nikon Coolpix digital camera--I think it's the one that Ashton Kutcher does the commercials for. The outdoor shots come out fine, but as you may have noticed in some of my previous blog posts, the interior shots are kinda blurry. Do I have it on the wrong setting, I wonder? I thought all these point and shoot jobs gave marvelous pictures for even idiots like me. I had a Canon that worked very well, but it got banged up and the screen where you see the shots went black. Jerry is going to lend me his camera so I can see if it's better than the Nikon. Moral for me and Bruce Willis: Don't trust Ashton Kutcher.

Unexpected Gay Subtexts in Batman

Aside from the most obvious gay subtexts on the Batman series were some subtles ones. In the second appearance of the Mad Hatter, The Contaminated Cowl/The Mad Hatter Runs Afoul, the villain (played by David Wayne with a sibilant s) sprays the Caped Crusader with radioactive spray turning his cowl a bright pink. Was this a hidden message to gay viewers--like the code phrase Friends of Dorothy--that Batman played on their team? Speaking of that expression, I was on a cruise a few years ago with my friend Diane and the ship's newsletter listed a meeting of Friends of Dorothy on the lido deck the first night. I thought, what is this, 1955? Do we gays still have to hide our identity like Batman from unsuspecting straights? I later asked the cruise's social director the reason for the anachronistic reference? He explained that in the cruise line's experience, listing Friends of Dorothy rather than gay and lesbian passengers, was an easier policy and wouldn't upset more conservative passengers. It turned out there was a huge group of gay guys travelling together and we all became friends during the cruise, and the straight passengers figured it out.

Sidenote: Featured in that episode of Batman was Leonid Kinskey, best known as the Russian bartender Sascha in Casablanca, as Prof. Overbeck, a German atomic scientist.

A few episodes later, there was a three-parter guest-starring the Penquin and Marsha, Queen of Diamonds, a villainess not featured in the comic books, played by Carolyn Jones, Morticia of The Addams Family. In the first segment, Penquin Is a Girl's Best Friend, Pengy tricks Batman into acting in a movie he's directing with Marsha as his star. As director of the project, Penquin forces Batman to kiss Marsha during several takes of a love scene. The female crook has coated her lips with a love potion to make Batman her willing slave. For some reason, the Masked Manhunter is reluctant to smooch the gorgeous villainness and he kicks his legs up and visibly resists. Robin later says "Boy I'll bet you never want to kiss another girl again." What kind of message is being sent here?

In an earlier episode, Marsha tricks Batman into marrying her in order to save Robin whom she has captured--mmmm, more subtle hints at the true relationship of Batman and Robin. Marsha wants to get the Bat-Diamond in the Batcave, but Batman vows no stranger will ever enter his secret liar. "Well, then marry me, darling, and I wouldn't be a stranger." Not exactly the firmest foundation for connubial bliss.

At the last minute, the Caped Crusader is saved from a fate worse than death by the quick thinking of Alfred who shows up with Aunt Harriet claiming she is Mrs. Batman--a beard if ever I saw one. We also learn Alfred has never been married. Double Hmmmm.

Scenes from the Life of an Amatuer Comic Book Collecter (21)--Supergirl's Lesbian Marriage

That Supergirl is one complex dish. Last time we talked about her intimate relationship with her Superhorse Comet, who is really a centaur. While reading through my recent 600-plus acquisition of comics, I came across another walk on the wild side for the Maid of Might. In Action #357, we learn of "Supergirl's Secret Marriage." While on her way from Stanhope College to visit her parents for the weekend, Supergirl in her secret identity of Linda Lee Danvers is accosted by a brash young man named Joaquin who boldly kisses her and claims to be her spouse. She tells him to go fly a kite, but he counters that he knows she is Supergirl and that she has had a memory lapse due to exposure to red kryptonite. Like an idiot, Linda gets in Joaquin's car and they drive to the home the man claims is theirs.

The ending is really twisted. It turns out Joaquin is a not a man at all, but a woman in disguise. In a flashback she explains that she is from another planet and that Supergirl rescued her and her boyfriend recently. He subsequently fell in love with the Blonde Blockbuster. The alien woman decides to masquerade as a male and take Supergirl off the market, thus sending her former lover back into her arms. Just like in As You Like It, Twelfth Night or Two Gentlemen of Verona.

How did Supergirl discover this sick ruse? When Joaquin kissed her "he" put "his" arms around Supergirl's neck. Supergirl claims that all men put their arms around a woman's waist while a female will place her hands on a boy's neck. Really? Don't you think Supergirl would have realized in some other less subtle way? Like maybe when she found Joaquin trying on her Supergirl costume? Or maybe she would have thought, "Well, maybe he's really an evangelist, like that Ted Haggard?"

This story is so weird on so many levels. Just from a practical point of view, wouldn't the boyfriend fall back in love with Supergirl once he realized his girlfriend was really his rival? To solve the problem of sleeping together, the disguised alien claimed "he" had to sleep in a special bed which give him a dose of radiation necessary for him to live in earth's hostile atmosphere.

The other story (featured on the cover) in that issue follows Superman as he must defeat a motorcycle driving juvenile delinquent with atomic fists. The kid takes over the government with his gang straight out of The Wild One.

Shootings in Arizona

It's been a weird weekend. I took the train upstate through beautiful snowscapes on Friday night. On Saturday, my partner Jerry and I attended the HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West with Deborah Voigt. We attended a different production a few summers ago at Glimmerglass which I found more intimate and moving. (Sidenote: did you know Andrew Lloyd Webber lifted one of his main themes of Phantom of the Opera from Puccini's score.) We saw the opera at Time and Space Limited, a neat small theatre in Hudson that shows really offbeat films in addition to HD broadcasts from the Met and the National Theatre of Great Britain.

After the opera, we heard on the radio about the shootings in Tuscon, Arizona where congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was wounded and six people were killed including a judge and a 9 year old little girl. It reminded of the late 1960s when I was about 10 and it seemed assassinations and violence were erupting every week. I remember I was watching Bewitched and they interupted it to announce that Martin Luther King had been killed.

It's only a day after the shootings and the political debate has already been launched. Did the violent rhetoric of the right--and yes, it's mostly--not ALL but mostly---coming from the right, I'm sorry but it is--create an atmosphere of rage to influence unbalanced individuals like the 22 year old nutjob who did the shooting? It's way too early to tell anything and I don't believe people like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, and Sharron Angle are purposely inciting violence. Well, I take that back about Sharron Angle. She did say discontented Tea Partiers should invoke "Second Amendment remedies" if things didn't turn out the way they wanted in the last midterm elections. But, I don't believe the rest really meant to incite violence. But when you use targets and crosshairs on images of people you disagree with, as Sarah Palin did on Giffords' congressional district in Arizona, you have to take responsibility for creating a dangerous climate.

Palin could have used less violent imagery to get across her point in the last election. We don't know if this crazy kid saw Palin's website and was inspired by it. We do know his ravings on the internet are incoherent and he may be just plain crazy and this would have happened with or without the media madness stirred up by Palin and her ilk. But people like Beck are invoking, even jokingly, violence and death against people like Michael Moore and Nancy Pelosi. I remember driving through Missouri a few years ago and listening to a local talk station. The host joked that he wanted to be fair, but then said "Michael Moore must hate this country." I just don't get that. Yes, you can disagree with Moore all you want, but must he hate this country just because he doesn't share your opinion on health care and gun control?

The sherriff of Tuscon said in a news conference yesterday that Arizona is becoming the capital of bigotry and inflamed rhetoric and that it's time for American media to tone it down. I believe all but a few fringe-lunatic Americans abhor violence, but too many in power both in the media and in politics have no problem using it to grab bigger ratings or more votes. And they have no conscience and sleep perfectly well when something like this happens because they don't make the connection. Sarah Palin and hubby Todd are getting a good night's sleep on their mattress stuffed with all their millions, and she is not responsible for yesterday's shootings. But she is responsible with her crosshairs imagery and scary talk of death panels in creating a climate of division and rancor.

Jetsons' Residence, Rosie Speaking

We have new phones at my office and we have an infinite choice of ring tones. I chose the Jetsons doorbell. This was one of my favorite shows since it predicted the world of the future not the past like the Flinstones. The best thing about the Flinstones was the animals who operated all the appliances and would look at the camera and say "It's a living."

The Jetsons on the other hand was about the world I was supposed to grow up in. I remember figuring out I would be about 40 in the year 2000. I imagined we would be flying around in rocket cars, vacationing on the moon, and spending the weekend in Acapulco, like Jane's friend Helen. ("Now that's what I call racy dialogue," Helen quipped when Jane and George could only say each other's name to each other after Jane's trip to a dude planet.)

The picture is of Jane getting ready for "My Space Lady" and George gave the tickets to Mr. Spacely. That episode always annoyed me because Mr. Spacely was within his rights to demand George forego the theatre, but to take his wife's ticket as well was just cruel. I always wandered what "My Space Lady" would have been like. Did Professor Henry Higgins-rocket make Eliza Spacelittle into a lady at the interplanetary ball?

Another Jetsons memory was when Rosie fell in love with Mac the Robot. When Henry the Janitor de-activated him, she went around saying "Eh-Neh" like she said Judy sounded when she was out of love.

The most interesting aspect of the Jetsons was its total lack of advancement for women. In their world, females are still mostly housewives with a fear of mice and poor driving skills.