Cheney's Temporary Freeze-Out

Temporary Freeze-Out

He added, on ABC's This Week, "Now, the fact is, Enron didn't get any special deals. Enron's been treated appropriately by this administration."

It's a high-risk gamble: I admire Cheney sticking it to the General Accounting Office (which is threatening to sue the administration), and that slimebag Rep. Henry Waxman in particular, but the political fallout for the White House might be disastrous if the public's semi-fascination with the Enron swindle lasts more than a couple of months. Of course, a recovering economy would make the public forget all about the little old ladies from Houston who lost, as the media's reminded us 100,000 times, their life savings because of Kenneth Lay's rapacious last-minute looting of the company. Now, if Enron employees had taken a more active role in checking their portfolios from time to time, instead of treating the 401(k) benefit as a don't-worry-be-happy perk, not as many would've gotten burned.

But that would've required responsibility, a word that doesn't have the pizzazz of schadenfreude, and as a result has been blotted out of American dictionaries.

At this point, it's useless to try to fight the frenzy inside the Beltway?unless you want to catch a vile strain of hypocrisy flu.

So I'll bend over and pretend to enjoy it when campaign finance reform is passed sometime this spring. Yes, it's a rape of the First Amendment?especially when newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post, which stand to gain even more power over political debate, won't be handcuffed like the NRA or Sierra Club?but what can a disgusted boy do, 'cept to sing for a rock 'n' roll band? If I were two decades younger I might hang out in Brooklyn and not even worry about the nonsense written about election-year politics in mares-eat-oats publications like The New Republic, The American Prospect and the Microsoft-subsidized abomination Slate.

Mind you, I realize that whatever version of "reform" that's agreed upon by Ethics Superiors Marty Meehan, John McCain, Chris Shays and Russ Feingold, it's the GOP that'll reap the advantages. Republicans are far better at collecting hard money, both in very small sums and those that hit the legal limit (currently $1000, but that's bound to be raised, further vexing the Democrats once they realize what's actually happened). It's still wrong: as The Wall Street Journal's John Fund pointed out, the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, among others, would've been mere ideas under current campaign laws.

And has anybody figured out the disconnect between the Democrats' desire for "reform" and DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe's front-loading of the 2004 primaries that'll result in the nomination of the candidate who raises the most money by the summer of 2003?

Ready for the return of Al Gore? Or do you prefer the pious John Kerry?

The boys and I hadn't taken a walking tour of the West Village in about a month, so last Sunday morning, before most residents had arisen, we had a pleasant couple of hours, notwithstanding the occasional puddles of puke on the sidewalks. I pointed out Bagels on the Square, and told the kids that years ago the three of us, them in a double-stroller, would saunter up there on Saturdays to purchase provisions, but they had an agenda that left no time for reminiscing. Which included casing Village Comics (214 Sullivan St.) for old MAD magazines and Spider Man comics; ducking into cheesy poster stores for Linkin Park keychains; and then off to Matt Umanov to buy some extra strings for MUGGER III's 3/4-sized electric guitar, on the order of his instructor, Sir George Tabb.

The May '98 MAD was extraordinarily prescient with its inside back cover "fold-in," which read, "What terrorist organization threatens the life and liberty of every American?" The tease goes on to say: "It used to be that we only had to worry about terrorist acts happening outside of the United States. Now the threats have reached our shores and everyone is living in a state of apprehension. But there is one especially evil and ruthless enemy that stands out as a source of constant tyranny. To find out who this dreaded menace to society is, fold page in as shown."

Obviously, "everyone" wasn't living in "a state of apprehension" four years ago, particularly the quota-driven CIA and FBI, not to mention the Justice Dept., but you get the idea. Anyway, connect A to B and what "menace" is revealed? The IRS! Someday, when a flat tax is enacted, those I-Want-Every-Single-Receipt auditors will be just as popular as the Good Humor guys and gals who jingle and jangle up and down suburban streets.

Junior was intent on picking up a Jay-Z CD, but was highly doubtful we'd meet with success at a Bleecker St. music outlet. He was correct: when I asked the clerk the whereabouts of those "tunes," he just snorted with disgust, an expression that my nine-year-old son returned instantaneously. Old codger that I am, there was plenty to hold my interest in the store's bins, and I didn't even flinch at the $40 tab for a live recording of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue from Nov. 26, '75, just a few weeks before I saw the show at the Garden's "Night of the Hurricane."

The cashier and I traded Dylan and bootleg stories for about 10 minutes before the boys got entirely bored and wanted to shove off. Hey, but that was a night! I was a college junior at the time and chugged up to NYC on Amtrak to meet one of my brothers at a Blarney Stone before taking our seats. My physical condition at the time wasn't tip-top: a season-long bronchitis bout had just ended when I cracked my head open playing 2 a.m. football inside a dorm at Goucher College, requiring 16 stitches and a dramatic ambulance ride to some hospital in Baltimore County. My brother, suspicious of the fedora I wore, took it off, inspected the damage, shook his head and ordered another Jack Daniel's before launching into a goodhearted lecture.

I could've done without Joan Baez?although who wasn't charmed by her "Diamonds and Rust"??but seeing Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakely and Scarlet Rivera in Dylan's backup ensemble reminded me how lame his '74 comeback tour with the Band had been.

Just a week earlier Mrs. M, the kids and I frolicked on our roof, taking advantage of a rare 3-inch snowfall. Growing up on Long Island, in the days when sleds, toboggans and flying saucers were actually used, I'd learned how to chuck a mean snowball. My wife's from Los Angeles, and our sons haven't had much practice, so I gave a quick lesson on how to pack the snow, which meant waiting till the sun came out to take advantage of the slush. Soon we were all firing bullets over the fence, just like I hope Pedro Martinez is currently doing with a real baseball down in Santo Domingo.

Need a quick reminder of the piss-poor state of American education? Ellen Sorokin reports in Monday's Washington Times that New Jersey's Dept. of Education has excluded George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin?those heretical dead white males?the Pilgrims and the Mayflower from the state's American history curriculum. In addition, Sorokin says, there's a 13-year controversy over whether students ought to even mess with the Declaration of Independence.

She writes: "Last summer, the New Jersey state legislature rejected the measure, which would have required students to recite a 56-word passage from the document every day. Some opponents said reciting the passage would do little to improve students' understanding of history. Others argued the passage, which begins 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' was insensitive to women and blacks. That phrase was written at a time when slavery was legal in the United States."

Oh, and also when democracy was born.

Meanwhile, in Tempe, AZ, two adolescents at the Connolly Middle School were punished for hugging on school grounds. Collin Neal and Jessamy Benington, both 14, received three days of "in-school intervention," which meant they had to attend a "special class."

Maybe I'm Enron-dazed, but does this make any sense? When I was an eighth-grader at Simpson Junior High School in Huntington, kids were doing a lot more than hugging between classes, and hardly a teacher raised an eyebrow. But?and perhaps it seems quaint today?those same students knew their country was comprised of 50 states; knew that Millard Fillmore was a White House dud; were familiar with Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine; and knew that Teddy Roosevelt took a bullet during his 1912 Bull Moose presidential campaign and still gave a scheduled speech.

Finally, I must pass on an excerpt from "Note from Kim," which appears in February's Paper. Kim's an owner of the now-thin monthly, shorn of its liquor and tobacco advertisements, but she's "optimistic" that the WTC murders will bring back the "edge" to New York City.

She writes, possibly on some intoxicant: "The landlords may still be on their bilking binge, but believe me it won't be for long. Their greed will surely cause many casualties this season, but at a certain point, it's about supply and demand. And then they'll have to step up to the plate. When enough freaked-out families and out-of-work yuppies have fled downtown for their country homes, and enough apartments and storefronts are sitting empty, rents will hopefully fall again. Only then will it be possible for that great edge to come back to New York?that unpredictable character that made this city the center of everything. When that happens, the crazy kids will dream and lust again to move here to make their mark, and then there will come a great revival: a cultural explosion reflecting the huge esthetic shift that is upon us at this historical time. And I can't wait. Once again, I will see my old friend New York City become the huge, insane, bubbling petri dish it once was, turning my home back into the cultural ground zero that it was meant to be. Amen."

Kim omits the plain fact that it's those "out-of-work" yuppies who once watched the clock at ad agencies and made decisions about $50 million budgets, a portion of which would wind up in Paper's pages. And it was those same "yuppies" who frequented the many restaurants that were given puff reviews in Kim's magazine. I guess this publisher is feeling nostalgic not only for that "bubbling petri dish," but also for the days when Paper was an all-volunteer, one-page newsprint foldout.

Cool. Pass the Goya tins.

Jan. 28

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