September 29, 2005

HORSEFEATHERS AWARD

        At the end of each Yankee game, broadcasters Jim Kaat and Michael Kay pick their player of the game. The American and National League each pick a player of the month. There are Most Valuable Player awards, Cy Young awards, World Series MVP's, etc. We enjoy these tributes to excellence, however fleeting. We each vicariously enjoy transcending our own limitations and acknowledging the extraordinary accomplishments of our fellow humans. In that same spirit, it seems to Horsefeathers that some acknowledgment should be given to transcendent stupidity, especially when expressed by those who believe they are uttering deep, invaluable truths. To merit the award requires something more than, say, Maureen Dowd's repetitive invocation of the evil 'neocons' and 'Bushies'. Her alcoholic-like ravings are merely vicious--an obvious outlet for Ms. Dowd's anti-semitism and sexual self loathing.
        A particularly rich source of self flattering ignorance is the "creative" world of authors, screenwriters, actors, directors and other members of the artistic elites. Our tendency is to idealize creative artists, and to assume that their utterances on any topic are worthy of special consideration. If the village idiot tells us that Bush=Hitler, we tend to dismiss it, but if a 'creative artist' produces a drawing of Bush with a Hitler mustache he is likely to see his work displayed at the Venice Bienalle. Our award goes to Nora Ephron. Her self-flattering concern for the dead people produced by W's war is a classic. No notice is taken of the huge numbers of dead at the hands of barbaric jihadis. No mention of the numbers of innocents tortured and murdered by Saddam. No mention of the plight of Afghanis under the Taliban. Ms. Ephron has never uttered a word about her co-religionists, the murdered Israeli children whose killers were financed by Saddam. Those deaths don't count because they can't be blamed on W. Reading this essay you would never know that 9-11 occurred, or that Iraq under Saddam was a vast killing ground. Certainly no notice is taken of the fact that Islam wishes to destroy the decadent likes of Nora Ephron. The interesting twist, earning Ms. Ephron the Horsefeathers award, is the way in which she blames Clinton for Bush! While the horrors of war are all W's fault, it's really Clinton who is to blame, because his Monica moment deprived the peace loving Al Gore of the White House. It would be hard to condense in one paragraph more idiocy than Ms. Ephron produces. Without further ado we present the first winner of the Horsefeathers Wordsmith Moron of the Week award to: Nora Ephron for her combination of narcissistic self absorption, grandiosity and cluelessness, on a grand scale. These attributes serve her well in her work for the Hollywood dream factory, where the gratification of wishful fantasies, a la Sleepless in Seattle, is a sure route to big bucks. Extend that utopian fantasizing to the realms of reality, and you get a moving story of love and loss. Here is the key paragraph: "...I'd sit around with friends at dinner talking about How We Got Here and Whose Fault Was It? Was it Nader's fault? Or Gore's? Or Scalia's? Even Monica got onto the list, because after all, she delivered the pizza, and that pizza was truly the beginning of the end. Most of my friends had a hard time narrowing it down to a choice, but not me: only one person was at fault, and it was Bill. I drew a straight line from that pizza to the war. The way I saw it, if Bill had behaved, Al would have been elected, and thousands and thousands of people would be alive today who are instead dead..."
        We defy anyone to top that paragraph!
Here's the rest of the Ephron article.:

After the Love Is Gone
By NORA EPHRON
Published: September 29, 2005
I broke up with Bill a long time ago. It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, was I really in love or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love or was I just desperate? But when it came to Bill, I'm pretty sure it was the real deal. I loved the guy.

As for Bill, I have to be honest: he did not love me. In fact, I never even crossed his mind. Not once. But in the beginning that didn't stop me. I loved him, I believed in him, and I didn't even think he was a liar. Of course, I knew he'd lied about his thing with Gennifer, but at the time I believed that lies of that sort didn't count. How stupid was that?

Anyway, I fell out of love with Bill early in the game - over gays in the military. That was in 1993, after he was inaugurated, and at that moment my heart turned to stone. People use that expression and mean it metaphorically, but if your heart can turn to stone and not have it be metaphorical, that's how stony my heart was where Bill was concerned. I'd had faith in him. I'd been positive he'd never back down. How could he? But then he did, he backed down just like that. He turned out to be just like the others. So that was it. Goodbye, big guy. I'm out of here. Don't even think about calling. And by the way, if your phone rings and your wife answers and the caller hangs up, don't think it's me because it's not.

By the time Bill got involved with Monica, you'd have thought I was past being hurt by him. You'd have thought I'd have shrugged and said, I told you so, you can't trust the guy as far as you can spit. But much to my surprise, Bill broke my heart all over again. I couldn't believe how betrayed I felt. He'd had it all, he'd had everything, and he'd thrown it away, and here's the thing: it wasn't his to throw away. It was ours. We'd given it to him, and he'd squandered it.

Years passed. I'd sit around with friends at dinner talking about How We Got Here and Whose Fault Was It? Was it Nader's fault? Or Gore's? Or Scalia's? Even Monica got onto the list, because after all, she delivered the pizza, and that pizza was truly the beginning of the end. Most of my friends had a hard time narrowing it down to a choice, but not me: only one person was at fault, and it was Bill. I drew a straight line from that pizza to the war. The way I saw it, if Bill had behaved, Al would have been elected, and thousands and thousands of people would be alive today who are instead dead.
I bring all this up because I bumped into Bill the other day. I was watching the Sunday news programs, and there he was. I have to say, he looked good. And he was succinct, none of that wordy blah-blah thing that used to drive me nuts. He'd invited a whole bunch of people to a conference in New York and they'd spent the week talking about global warming, and poverty, and all sorts of obscure places he knows a huge amount about.

When Bill described the conference, it was riveting. I could see how much he cared; and of course, I could see how smart he was. It was so refreshing. It was practically moving. To my amazement, I could even see why I'd loved the guy in the first place. It made me sadder than I can say. It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.

Then, later in the week, I was reading about Bill's conference, and I came upon something that made me think, for just a moment, that Bill might even want me back. "I've reached an age now where it doesn't matter whatever happens to me," he said. "I just don't want anyone to die before their time any more." It almost really got to me. But then I came to my senses. And instead I just wanted to pick up the phone and call him and say, if you genuinely believe that, you hypocrite, why don't you stand up and take a position against this war?

But I'm not calling. I haven't called in years and I'm not starting now.