"That Girl" 45 Years Later — Who Are the Game Changers This TV Season?
September 26, 2011 No Comment
I received an email wishing me a happy 45th anniversary the other day and my first thought was, “Phil and I have only been married for 30 years.” And then I realized it wasn’t my wedding they were talking about — it was the anniversary of “That Girl.” Hard to believe now but 45 years ago, my character Ann Marie, was the only girl in town. In this season’s television lineup, there are nearly a dozen new shows starring bright, funny young women: “New Girl,” “2 Broke Girls,” “Whitney,” and others. And as they did with Ann Marie, the young women watching today will not only be entertained by these “girls”, they’ll also think, “Hey, that’s me!” Or, ” Wow, that could be me!” And that is one of the best things television can do: give people a chance to see themselves transformed. And to let ideas and characters come from below the surface and say, “I am here! See me!” Ann Marie seemed like a revolutionary figure at the time but, in truth, every home had a “That Girl” in it. She was the right character for that moment in time. She moved away from the traditional idea of a young woman in the society — she was independent, living alone, not defined by her family. She was out in the world and working for the life she wanted. She was making her own choices. Because of the collective wisdom of all of us working on the show — co-creator Bill Persky who grew up side by side with a sister and then raised three daughters of his own, our story editor Ruth Brooks Flippen with her experience of trying to make it in a male dominated television writing community, and me, who had fought for my independence in an old-fashioned Dad Is Boss, Mom Agrees atmosphere — we had each lived different parts of the old story … and brought with us the passion needed to change it. There I was playing a young woman just starting her life in the big city, struggling to get an acting job — any acting job. And today there’s Tina Fey as Liz Lemon. Liz not only has a good job on a show, she’s running the show. I can’t help but wonder if producer Liz would have hired actress Ann Marie? I was a great dancing chicken. And she should have seen me as a singing mop! Bill Persky said at the time, “‘That Girl’ threw a hand grenade into the bunker, and all the other female characters walked right through.” Every generation has it’s own grenade throwers. Chris Colfer is one as the scene-stealing Kurt Hummel on Glee — a character that truly impacts the lives of gay teenagers. And the loving gay couple on Modern Family. These characters show us television’s willingness — however late-coming — to embrace gay people and their relationships When I think of the 45th anniversary of “That Girl”, I like to envision a fabulous dinner party with all the women who followed Ann Marie. Mary Richards would be there, throwing her cap up in the air. Kate & Allie, who represented the first contemporary single moms on TV, would be there, too (they’d have to get a sitter, but still). I can see Ann worrying about Rosanne, who’s pretty outspoken and wondering if she’d like anyone. But then sitting her next to Murphy Brown, who’s got a few opinions of her own, and watching those two get along great. And then she’d put Rachel from Friends next to Carrie Bradshaw. We’d invite Donald — but of course, he couldn’t stay over. And Mr Big who could. What a great celebration it would be. And I know every one of those women would love hanging out with each other. After all, they’re all from the same family tree. And I’m sure someone would make a toast — probably Roseanne — who always calls it as it is. And her toast would be, “Here’s to television! May it always do what it can do better than anything, open the doors to what is truly happening in America, so everyone watching can say, “Hey, that’s me!” or “Wow, that could be me!” So here’s to a great new TV season. Hope you see someone you know!
Continue reading …"That Girl" 45 Years Later — Who Are the Game Changers This TV Season?
September 26, 2011 No CommentI received an email wishing me a happy 45th anniversary the other day and my first thought was, “Phil and I have only been married for 30 years.” And then I realized it wasn’t my wedding they were talking about — it was the anniversary of “That Girl.” Hard to believe now but 45 years ago, my character Ann Marie, was the only girl in town. In this season’s television lineup, there are nearly a dozen new shows starring bright, funny young women: “New Girl,” “2 Broke Girls,” “Whitney,” and others. And as they did with Ann Marie, the young women watching today will not only be entertained by these “girls”, they’ll also think, “Hey, that’s me!” Or, ” Wow, that could be me!” And that is one of the best things television can do: give people a chance to see themselves transformed. And to let ideas and characters come from below the surface and say, “I am here! See me!” Ann Marie seemed like a revolutionary figure at the time but, in truth, every home had a “That Girl” in it. She was the right character for that moment in time. She moved away from the traditional idea of a young woman in the society — she was independent, living alone, not defined by her family. She was out in the world and working for the life she wanted. She was making her own choices. Because of the collective wisdom of all of us working on the show — co-creator Bill Persky who grew up side by side with a sister and then raised three daughters of his own, our story editor Ruth Brooks Flippen with her experience of trying to make it in a male dominated television writing community, and me, who had fought for my independence in an old-fashioned Dad Is Boss, Mom Agrees atmosphere — we had each lived different parts of the old story … and brought with us the passion needed to change it. There I was playing a young woman just starting her life in the big city, struggling to get an acting job — any acting job. And today there’s Tina Fey as Liz Lemon. Liz not only has a good job on a show, she’s running the show. I can’t help but wonder if producer Liz would have hired actress Ann Marie? I was a great dancing chicken. And she should have seen me as a singing mop! Bill Persky said at the time, “‘That Girl’ threw a hand grenade into the bunker, and all the other female characters walked right through.” Every generation has it’s own grenade throwers. Chris Colfer is one as the scene-stealing Kurt Hummel on Glee — a character that truly impacts the lives of gay teenagers. And the loving gay couple on Modern Family. These characters show us television’s willingness — however late-coming — to embrace gay people and their relationships When I think of the 45th anniversary of “That Girl”, I like to envision a fabulous dinner party with all the women who followed Ann Marie. Mary Richards would be there, throwing her cap up in the air. Kate & Allie, who represented the first contemporary single moms on TV, would be there, too (they’d have to get a sitter, but still). I can see Ann worrying about Rosanne, who’s pretty outspoken and wondering if she’d like anyone. But then sitting her next to Murphy Brown, who’s got a few opinions of her own, and watching those two get along great. And then she’d put Rachel from Friends next to Carrie Bradshaw. We’d invite Donald — but of course, he couldn’t stay over. And Mr Big who could. What a great celebration it would be. And I know every one of those women would love hanging out with each other. After all, they’re all from the same family tree. And I’m sure someone would make a toast — probably Roseanne — who always calls it as it is. And her toast would be, “Here’s to television! May it always do what it can do better than anything, open the doors to what is truly happening in America, so everyone watching can say, “Hey, that’s me!” or “Wow, that could be me!” So here’s to a great new TV season. Hope you see someone you know!
Continue reading …"That Girl" 45 Years Later — Who Are the Game Changers This TV Season?
September 26, 2011 No CommentI received an email wishing me a happy 45th anniversary the other day and my first thought was, “Phil and I have only been married for 30 years.” And then I realized it wasn’t my wedding they were talking about — it was the anniversary of “That Girl.” Hard to believe now but 45 years ago, my character Ann Marie, was the only girl in town. In this season’s television lineup, there are nearly a dozen new shows starring bright, funny young women: “New Girl,” “2 Broke Girls,” “Whitney,” and others. And as they did with Ann Marie, the young women watching today will not only be entertained by these “girls”, they’ll also think, “Hey, that’s me!” Or, ” Wow, that could be me!” And that is one of the best things television can do: give people a chance to see themselves transformed. And to let ideas and characters come from below the surface and say, “I am here! See me!” Ann Marie seemed like a revolutionary figure at the time but, in truth, every home had a “That Girl” in it. She was the right character for that moment in time. She moved away from the traditional idea of a young woman in the society — she was independent, living alone, not defined by her family. She was out in the world and working for the life she wanted. She was making her own choices. Because of the collective wisdom of all of us working on the show — co-creator Bill Persky who grew up side by side with a sister and then raised three daughters of his own, our story editor Ruth Brooks Flippen with her experience of trying to make it in a male dominated television writing community, and me, who had fought for my independence in an old-fashioned Dad Is Boss, Mom Agrees atmosphere — we had each lived different parts of the old story … and brought with us the passion needed to change it. There I was playing a young woman just starting her life in the big city, struggling to get an acting job — any acting job. And today there’s Tina Fey as Liz Lemon. Liz not only has a good job on a show, she’s running the show. I can’t help but wonder if producer Liz would have hired actress Ann Marie? I was a great dancing chicken. And she should have seen me as a singing mop! Bill Persky said at the time, “‘That Girl’ threw a hand grenade into the bunker, and all the other female characters walked right through.” Every generation has it’s own grenade throwers. Chris Colfer is one as the scene-stealing Kurt Hummel on Glee — a character that truly impacts the lives of gay teenagers. And the loving gay couple on Modern Family. These characters show us television’s willingness — however late-coming — to embrace gay people and their relationships When I think of the 45th anniversary of “That Girl”, I like to envision a fabulous dinner party with all the women who followed Ann Marie. Mary Richards would be there, throwing her cap up in the air. Kate & Allie, who represented the first contemporary single moms on TV, would be there, too (they’d have to get a sitter, but still). I can see Ann worrying about Rosanne, who’s pretty outspoken and wondering if she’d like anyone. But then sitting her next to Murphy Brown, who’s got a few opinions of her own, and watching those two get along great. And then she’d put Rachel from Friends next to Carrie Bradshaw. We’d invite Donald — but of course, he couldn’t stay over. And Mr Big who could. What a great celebration it would be. And I know every one of those women would love hanging out with each other. After all, they’re all from the same family tree. And I’m sure someone would make a toast — probably Roseanne — who always calls it as it is. And her toast would be, “Here’s to television! May it always do what it can do better than anything, open the doors to what is truly happening in America, so everyone watching can say, “Hey, that’s me!” or “Wow, that could be me!” So here’s to a great new TV season. Hope you see someone you know!
Continue reading …"That Girl" 45 Years Later — Who Are the Game Changers This TV Season?
September 26, 2011 No Comment
I received an email wishing me a happy 45th anniversary the other day and my first thought was, “Phil and I have only been married for 30 years.” And then I realized it wasn’t my wedding they were talking about — it was the anniversary of “That Girl.” Hard to believe now but 45 years ago, my character Ann Marie, was the only girl in town. In this season’s television lineup, there are nearly a dozen new shows starring bright, funny young women: “New Girl,” “2 Broke Girls,” “Whitney,” and others. And as they did with Ann Marie, the young women watching today will not only be entertained by these “girls”, they’ll also think, “Hey, that’s me!” Or, ” Wow, that could be me!” And that is one of the best things television can do: give people a chance to see themselves transformed. And to let ideas and characters come from below the surface and say, “I am here! See me!” Ann Marie seemed like a revolutionary figure at the time but, in truth, every home had a “That Girl” in it. She was the right character for that moment in time. She moved away from the traditional idea of a young woman in the society — she was independent, living alone, not defined by her family. She was out in the world and working for the life she wanted. She was making her own choices. Because of the collective wisdom of all of us working on the show — co-creator Bill Persky who grew up side by side with a sister and then raised three daughters of his own, our story editor Ruth Brooks Flippen with her experience of trying to make it in a male dominated television writing community, and me, who had fought for my independence in an old-fashioned Dad Is Boss, Mom Agrees atmosphere — we had each lived different parts of the old story … and brought with us the passion needed to change it. There I was playing a young woman just starting her life in the big city, struggling to get an acting job — any acting job. And today there’s Tina Fey as Liz Lemon. Liz not only has a good job on a show, she’s running the show. I can’t help but wonder if producer Liz would have hired actress Ann Marie? I was a great dancing chicken. And she should have seen me as a singing mop! Bill Persky said at the time, “‘That Girl’ threw a hand grenade into the bunker, and all the other female characters walked right through.” Every generation has it’s own grenade throwers. Chris Colfer is one as the scene-stealing Kurt Hummel on Glee — a character that truly impacts the lives of gay teenagers. And the loving gay couple on Modern Family. These characters show us television’s willingness — however late-coming — to embrace gay people and their relationships When I think of the 45th anniversary of “That Girl”, I like to envision a fabulous dinner party with all the women who followed Ann Marie. Mary Richards would be there, throwing her cap up in the air. Kate & Allie, who represented the first contemporary single moms on TV, would be there, too (they’d have to get a sitter, but still). I can see Ann worrying about Rosanne, who’s pretty outspoken and wondering if she’d like anyone. But then sitting her next to Murphy Brown, who’s got a few opinions of her own, and watching those two get along great. And then she’d put Rachel from Friends next to Carrie Bradshaw. We’d invite Donald — but of course, he couldn’t stay over. And Mr Big who could. What a great celebration it would be. And I know every one of those women would love hanging out with each other. After all, they’re all from the same family tree. And I’m sure someone would make a toast — probably Roseanne — who always calls it as it is. And her toast would be, “Here’s to television! May it always do what it can do better than anything, open the doors to what is truly happening in America, so everyone watching can say, “Hey, that’s me!” or “Wow, that could be me!” So here’s to a great new TV season. Hope you see someone you know!
Continue reading …New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the latest billionaire to fire back at Warren Buffett’s call to raise taxes on America’s super-rich, reports the New York Daily News . “The Buffett thing is just theatrics,” scoffed Bloomberg on NBC’s Meet the Press . “I think that it’s more than a sound-bite economic…
Continue reading …“I will always err on the side of life.” Rick Perry, signed off on 234 executions Dearest Web Log , This virtual space has, so far , been dedicated to my slapstick encounter with the American police state. But with the execution of Troy Davis, a few false charges and a potential year in jail seems like such a white thing to complain about. Like my socks and sandals don’t match my cargo shorts or something. Davis’s murder (may read differently depending on your politics) brings to light a profoundly darker comedy called American Morality. It’s funny in the way that absurd non sequiturs can be, like monkey pajamas, or Fox News. As a nation, we don’t have a real good handle on the whole morality thing. For instance, and this is not a joke, some people profess to know with absolute certainty that our moral code was dictated by an all-powerful space ghost, who sculpted us out of magic clay, and transcribed on stone by a mountain-climbing desert-hobo who looked a great deal like Charlton Heston. The people who believe these things are called idiots. Maybe you’ve seen them infesting our politics and poisoning our culture…at last week’s Fox News #googledebate. Bachmann and Perry are both – to varying degrees – Dominionists, which means they’re trying to conquer the “seven mountains” of cultural power by conducting “strategic level spiritual warfare” against the “higher level demons” who currently control eastern religions, witchcraft, Freemasonry, and the heathen souls of all non Christians around the globe, like PZ Myers. Romney and Hunstman are Mormons, which means they ostensibly believe that God lives on the planet Kolob and, if they’re extra good Mormons, they’ll become Gods themselves in the afterlife. And don’t get me started on the Golden Tablets or the Jewish Native Americans. Even Newt Gingrich has to pretend to be a good, God-fearing non-sack of walking excrement. Ron Paul says he believes that life starts at conception, and that evolution is just a theory, but he only genuinely worships at the deregulated altar of Ayn Rand. Herman Caine is a Baptist minister. And his 999 deal means that he’s is definitely not the pizza-slinging Antichrist. And Rick Santorum is so religious he’s an obvious homosexual. Troy Davis didn’t come up at the debate, which, in this blogger’s opinion, was a huge missed opportunity for the candidates to connect with the base by singing another patriotic rendition of “Let him die!” The crowd did boo a gay soldier, so there was that rare moment of Republican honesty – and when Mitt Romney said, “There are a lot of reasons not to vote for me.” And that’s what morality ultimately boils down to: honesty. Intellectual honesty about what makes what moral and why. (Or about global warming, vaccines, etc.) It’s no longer good enough to say it’s in the Bible. In Psalms, God bestows his blessing on those who smash babies against rocks. We all know it’s wrong to do that, so the religious minded are forced to cherry-pick the Bible, for passages that justify their inherent ethical character – whether it’s giving to the poor or dreaming of stoning homosexuals to death while they masturbate. It’s a real grab bag, across America’s political-religious spectrum, but the Republican field is on record as being firmly against giving to the poor. Our economic morality, or intense lack thereof, is a nice example of religious thinking based on intellectual dishonesty. This is Ron Paul’s altar of Rand – not the Aqua Buddha guy. All we ever hear about, and are impoverished by, is supply-side bunk. I mean, when’s the last time you heard something about demand-side economics? You shouldn’t have to because that phrase is redundant. The sad thing is that people don’t know that…word. (Just a side note: I bought a $5 pizza the other day using Groupon. It was so cheap because enough people signed on to the deal, and lowered the price by buying in bulk. Apply this capitalist principle to government-negotiated prescription costs or single-payer health care, however, and God will punish the U.S. for being evil, atheist socialists. Probably with a hurricane. OK?) The foundation of ethics erodes quickly on a ground of lies. From our religion to our news sources, we are not an intellectually honest people. The instances of untruth on Fox News are myriad, but here’s their spin on the last words of Troy Davis: Convicted Cop Killer Troy Davis Told Family of Victim That He Was ‘Sorry for Their Loss’ Before Execution And here’s what he actually said , according to an AP reporter present: I’d like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I’m not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent. The incident that happened that night is not my fault. I did not have a gun. All I can ask … is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth. I ask my family and friends to continue to fight this fight… How they got from that to saying he was ‘sorry’ is…confusing, like palm trees in Madison, Wisconsin, or how the tides work. American morality is not only conflated with our primitive religion, it’s held captive by our political leanings, and actually confused for empirical fact via motivated reasoning. The modern news consumer knows what they want to hear before they hear it, so we cherry-pick news sources the same way we do the bible. It’s called confirmation bias, and the entire Murdoch empire is built upon this model. (And, yes, while this does happen for anti-vaccination nuts and 9/11 Truthers on the left, it’s not at all an equivalent phenomenon.) Funny, these days the sentiments of an atheist are usually far more “Christian” than the thoughts of the religious. The aforementioned prominent atheist PZ Myers said this about Troy Davis: As I said before, I don’t care whether he was guilty or innocent, the death penalty is barbarous and irrevocable. There was no justice this evening, only vengeance. Bryan Fischer spokesman for the American Family Association, one of the sponsors of Rick Perry’s day of fasting and prayer, wrote an op-ed a couple weeks before Troy Davis’s murder entitled: Is the death penalty Christian? Of course it is. This was likely the longest possible way of saying that religion does not equate to morality. Religious people can be moral, and atheists need not be (GRRR STALIN!!!), but we just don’t seem to get this – unless we’re talking about Islam. As one small example of many, the town of Bay Minette, Alabama is now giving nonviolent offenders an option between jail time and church time. Seriously . I left off Troy Davis’s final-final words because they’re the most depressing of all: For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls. And that’s the sad ironing of it all. The oppressed and the oppressors both live under God’s racist, murderous thumb. (And, of course, I know that a) many of our leaders who profess religiosity are lying and b) corporate power structures may conveniently overlap with religious goals but they’re not intrinsically religious.) Maybe it’s in poor taste to criticize the religious conviction of the victim, and religion has historically been a force of good in the civil rights movement, but I can’t help feel that religion in this country has reached its righteous limits. It’s a very old sentiment that religion keeps the masses obedient and docile, but as our understanding of the world has evolved, it seems clearer all the time. As Sam Harris argues that the belief of religious moderates provides cover to religious extremists, it’s my contention that the righteously religious (yes, they exist) lend a similar credence to barbaric fools who want to “fix” gay people and find no moral dilemma in state-sanctioned murder – despite the glaring edict “Thou shalt not kill.” Maybe I’m off entirely blaming religion for out contorted sense of morality. As labor writer Mike Elk recently pointed out in the context of Troy Davis, Don Blankenship, the Massey Energy CEO ultimately responsible for the death of 29 at their Upper Big Branch mine in’10, hasn’t served one day in jail. And NYC police dusted off a 150 year-old law against wearing masks to arrest protestors on Wall Street while the hedge fund, banking crooks who ruined the world economy have proven themselves immune to prosecution. This is, in essence, a continuing battle between the haves and the have-nots. (And as of Saturday, the police in lower Manhattan have gone into full-on gatekeeper mode, attacking and unlawfully arresting scores of peaceful protesters.) But looking at those wackos up on the Republican debate stage in Orlando, it seems obvious that religion is not helping. Remember the “Seven Mountains” of cultural power sought by the Dominionists: home, church, business/technology, arts/entertainment, education, and media. They seek not a convenient overlap between corporate control and religious dogma, but literal dominion over the entire kaboodle. The prevailing trend in countering our nation’s perverse, religion-infested, Republican-steeped sense of morality is to fight delusional fire with delusional fire. Democratic consultant, and founder of the American Values Network , Burns Strider is at the fore, fighting anti-social Republican dogma with the true values of Christianity (by hilariously pitting Jesus against Ayn Rand). But it’s past time to decide whether we want to be Old Testament thugs or New Testament hippies. It’s time to decide whether we want justice based in reality or justice based in fairy tales — whether religious, moral, or economic. __________ Ian Murphy is the evil editor of The BEAST . You should probably follow him on the Twitter .
Continue reading …Media Mash: CNN’s Romans Pushes ‘Buffett Rule’; There’s No Appeasing Chris Matthews
September 26, 2011 No Comment“Greece has got a 45 percent income tax, a 23 percent value-added tax on top of that, so Greece should be in fine shape according to this economic theory,” NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox News's Sean Hannity on Friday, reacting to a clip of CNN's Christine Romans insisting that “serious economists” all agree that taxes must be raised on America's highest income earners. “This is a press release by the Obama campaign,” Bozell complained, adding that “cutting the size of government… capping spending” and “cutting the deficit” are options that are “off the table, not just with Obama, but with CNN.” [See video after page break] Also discussed on Friday's “Media Mash” segment was how MSNBC's Chris Matthews insisted that Texas Gov. Rick Perry accused President Obama of “pro-Nazi behavior” because he argued that Obama had “appeased the Arab Street at the expense of our own national security interests.” “Sean, somebody medicate this man quick,” an amused Bozell quipped, noting that Matthews himself has used the word “appeased” in domestic political stories: BOZELL: Who said in July, “Will John Boehner try to appease the Tea Party?” and who said last December, “Will Barack Obama try to appease the angry Left?” HANNITY: Chris Matthews. BOZELL: Chris Matthews. There ya go.
Continue reading …
Go to Barnes & Noble. Read pages 137-142. Put the book back on the shelf. After reading The Rogue, Joe McGinniss’ new book on the life and meteoric rise of Sarah Palin, that’s my advice. Joe McGinniss is a smart guy, an entertaining drinking companion, and a journeyman wordsmith who has taught himself how to tell a story even when there is no story to tell. But thousands of writers have the same skill-set. What throughout his career has distinguished Joe from his peers is that he also is an unusually talented marketeer. That’s a compliment. Because any trade press publisher will tell you that what a writer has to have in order to get published these days is a “platform.” “Platform” is trade press lingo for an author’s ability to generate the kind of free publicity in newspapers and magazines, through radio and television appearances, and on the Internet that can move product, which, like a tube of toothpaste or a six-pack of Diet Coke, is what a book is. As everyone who has been reading the comic strip Doonesbury recently knows, Joe McGinniss has constructed a brilliant platform for The Rogue. Joe first began building that platform back in 1969 when an imprint of Simon & Schuster published The Selling of the President, Joe’s expose of how Roger Ailes used network television to sell Richard Nixon to the electorate during the 1968 presidential election. Since the book tour on which he embarked to sell The Selling of the President, Joe has demonstrated a natural gift for self-promotion. But at the core, Joe McGinniss is a derivative talent who, thanks to Gary Trudeau, the cartoonist who draws Doonesbury, is this week’s most famous writer in America only because more than 40 years ago Joe set-about ripping off Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the writer who reinvented the writer’s platform for the modern media age. Dr. Thompson’s manic genius was to write himself into the middle of the story. In 1966 Random House published Hell’s Angels in which Hunter experimented with reporting on the famous outlaw motorcycle gang by reporting on riding with them, an account that ends with the postscript: “On Labor Day 1966, I pushed my luck a little too far and got badly stomped by four or five Angels who seemed to feel I was taking advantage of them.” By 1971 when Random House published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dr. Thompson had become the central subject of his own writing, his Wild Turkey-fueled drug-riven adventures the spine of the narrative around which he strung snippets of information about whatever the subject was that he purportedly was being paid to write about. As a writer Joe McGinniss is no Hunter Thompson. Compare “I moved in next door to Sarah Palin today,” the first sentence of The Rogue, with “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” the legendary first sentence of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. So what does Hunter Thompson have to do with Joe McGinniss? In The Selling of the President, which Joe wrote two years after the publication of Hell’s Angels, Joe made himself a minor character in the Roger Ailes/Richard Nixon story. Then, following along behind on the trail Dr. Thompson had blazed nine years earlier in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in Going to Extremes, which Alfred Knopf published in 1980, Joe imitated Hunter by making himself the story in his first-person account of a winter he spent in Alaska. Joe passes through Juneau. Joe visits the Prudhoe Bay oil field. Joe flies to Bethel. Joe spends time in Anchorage. Joe meets some locals. That’s the book. When Joe McGinniss passed through Alaska to “research” Going to Extremes I had been living there six years. So I knew the places Joe visited, and a number of the people about whom Joe wrote were friends or acquaintances of mine. I thought then and continue to think now that Going to Extremes was an entertaining read but an inconsequential book. But more than thirty years later Going to Extremes is still in print and remains one of the best-selling books that has ever been written about Alaska. Not because of its content, which is stale and of no lasting importance. But because of the genius Joe brought to promoting Going to Extremes by making himself the center of his own writing and his own book marketing campaign. Having mastered in Going to Extremes the formula Hunter Thompson had pioneered, in 1983 Joe used that formula again to earn another six figure payday when G.P. Putnam’s Sons published Fatal Vision, Joe’s account of the time he spent living with Captain Jeffrey MacDonald and his defense attorneys when the army put MacDonald on trial for having carved up his wife and children in their home on the Fort Bragg Army Base in North Carolina. I mention all that because The Rogue is Going to Extremes Redux. It’s a marketing platform. It’s not a book. In The Rogue Joe flies to Alaska and rents the house next door to Sarah and Todd Palin and their dysfunctional brood on the shore of Lake Lucille in Wasilla. Joe buys two arm chairs at a garage sale. Joe drives to Fairbanks. Joe visits Homer. Joe flies to Sitka. Joe’s wife comes for a visit. Joe packs up and flies home. That’s the narrative, which is of interest only in its odd passivity. Around the spine of that narrative The Rogue hangs snippets of information about Sarah Palin that Joe (or his research assistant?) plucked out of the thousands of newspaper and magazine articles that have been written about Sarah over the past three years, including several of mine. The Rogue also passes along rumors, innuendos, and first and secondhand hearsay that the various people Joe sought out passed along to him. Are those rumors, innuendos, and hearsay worth the $25 Joe and Random House want you to spend in order to read them? You can decide for yourself. But I don’t think so. So what if during the 1980s Sarah and Todd Palin snorted a line or two of cocaine off the top of an oil drum? As anyone, starting but hardly ending with me, who was there will tell you, in Alaska during the 1980s almost everyone Sarah and Todd Palin’s ages who had the money to do so did coke, including quite a few members of the Alaska Legislature and the late twenty and early thirty-something staff members who worked for them who occasionally coked up in public off lines they laid down on the tops of the tables at which they were sitting in the Latchstring, which until it burnt down in an arson, was the Legislature’s principal watering hole in the state capital. So Sarah’s recreational drug use during the 1980s was hardly aberrant. And so what if, as Joe tells us that one of her “friends” told him, when she was 23 and single Sarah fucked (according to Joe, Sarah’s word choice) a black college basketball star who was about her same age? Is it any of the world’s business who Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Michele Bachmann were fucking when they were single and 23? And what does whoever that may have been have to do with their qualifications to be President of the United States in 2012? But if The Rogue is to books what the Saw franchise is to movies, using the platform he has spent the past 40 years building to exploit Sarah Palin (who certainly deserves being exploited) for what this time around may be a seven figure payday, Joe McGinniss has done America an important service by including in The Rogue a description of the lunch Joe had with Gary and Corky Wheeler. Gary Wheeler is not a disgruntled Wasilla homeboy or one of Sarah’s unnamed “friends” who talked to Joe because they are embittered road kill who friend Sarah chewed up and then (to mix my metaphors) left gut-shot along the side of the Parks Highway that runs through Wasilla during her it-only-can-happen-in-America journey up the line from small town mayor to People magazine icon. Gary Wheeler is a retired Alaska State Trooper who provided security for Sarah during the two-plus years she served as Governor of Alaska, just as he had the two governors who preceded her. Spending hours of private face-time with Governor Palin gave Trooper Wheeler an opportunity to assess Sarah’s intellect, character, and temperament that few other people, and certainly not John McCain before he selected her as his vice presidential running mate, have had. If Sarah decides to run for President (which I’ve been betting that, when push finally comes to shove, she’s not going to do) Joe McGinniss is going to sell a lot more copies of The Rogue than the several tens of thousands he already has because Trooper Wheeler’s assessment of candidate Palin will be required reading. If you can’t wait until Sarah announces whether she’s running or not, go to Barnes & Noble, pull The Rogue down off the shelf, and read pages 137-142. I won’t spoil your fun other than to predict that if based on what you’ve seen of her over the past three years you suspect that Sarah Palin is a narcissistic and intellectually incurious sociopath Gary Wheeler will confirm your hunch. And for those of you who may not be able to get to your local Barnes & Noble before The Rogue sells out, I’ll pass along Trooper Wheeler’s bottom line. Which is that Sarah Palin’s “no mama grizzly; she’s a rabid wolf. Take a look at the snow: wherever she’s been, there’s a trail of blood in her wake.” So thanks Joe. That quote alone makes The Rogue worth every dollar that I have to fess up that I took my own advice and didn’t pay for it.
Continue reading …Go to Barnes & Noble. Read pages 137-142. Put the book back on the shelf. After reading The Rogue, Joe McGinniss’ new book on the life and meteoric rise of Sarah Palin, that’s my advice. Joe McGinniss is a smart guy, an entertaining drinking companion, and a journeyman wordsmith who has taught himself how to tell a story even when there is no story to tell. But thousands of writers have the same skill-set. What throughout his career has distinguished Joe from his peers is that he also is an unusually talented marketeer. That’s a compliment. Because any trade press publisher will tell you that what a writer has to have in order to get published these days is a “platform.” “Platform” is trade press lingo for an author’s ability to generate the kind of free publicity in newspapers and magazines, through radio and television appearances, and on the Internet that can move product, which, like a tube of toothpaste or a six-pack of Diet Coke, is what a book is. As everyone who has been reading the comic strip Doonesbury recently knows, Joe McGinniss has constructed a brilliant platform for The Rogue. Joe first began building that platform back in 1969 when an imprint of Simon & Schuster published The Selling of the President, Joe’s expose of how Roger Ailes used network television to sell Richard Nixon to the electorate during the 1968 presidential election. Since the book tour on which he embarked to sell The Selling of the President, Joe has demonstrated a natural gift for self-promotion. But at the core, Joe McGinniss is a derivative talent who, thanks to Gary Trudeau, the cartoonist who draws Doonesbury, is this week’s most famous writer in America only because more than 40 years ago Joe set-about ripping off Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the writer who reinvented the writer’s platform for the modern media age. Dr. Thompson’s manic genius was to write himself into the middle of the story. In 1966 Random House published Hell’s Angels in which Hunter experimented with reporting on the famous outlaw motorcycle gang by reporting on riding with them, an account that ends with the postscript: “On Labor Day 1966, I pushed my luck a little too far and got badly stomped by four or five Angels who seemed to feel I was taking advantage of them.” By 1971 when Random House published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dr. Thompson had become the central subject of his own writing, his Wild Turkey-fueled drug-riven adventures the spine of the narrative around which he strung snippets of information about whatever the subject was that he purportedly was being paid to write about. As a writer Joe McGinniss is no Hunter Thompson. Compare “I moved in next door to Sarah Palin today,” the first sentence of The Rogue, with “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” the legendary first sentence of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. So what does Hunter Thompson have to do with Joe McGinniss? In The Selling of the President, which Joe wrote two years after the publication of Hell’s Angels, Joe made himself a minor character in the Roger Ailes/Richard Nixon story. Then, following along behind on the trail Dr. Thompson had blazed nine years earlier in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in Going to Extremes, which Alfred Knopf published in 1980, Joe imitated Hunter by making himself the story in his first-person account of a winter he spent in Alaska. Joe passes through Juneau. Joe visits the Prudhoe Bay oil field. Joe flies to Bethel. Joe spends time in Anchorage. Joe meets some locals. That’s the book. When Joe McGinniss passed through Alaska to “research” Going to Extremes I had been living there six years. So I knew the places Joe visited, and a number of the people about whom Joe wrote were friends or acquaintances of mine. I thought then and continue to think now that Going to Extremes was an entertaining read but an inconsequential book. But more than thirty years later Going to Extremes is still in print and remains one of the best-selling books that has ever been written about Alaska. Not because of its content, which is stale and of no lasting importance. But because of the genius Joe brought to promoting Going to Extremes by making himself the center of his own writing and his own book marketing campaign. Having mastered in Going to Extremes the formula Hunter Thompson had pioneered, in 1983 Joe used that formula again to earn another six figure payday when G.P. Putnam’s Sons published Fatal Vision, Joe’s account of the time he spent living with Captain Jeffrey MacDonald and his defense attorneys when the army put MacDonald on trial for having carved up his wife and children in their home on the Fort Bragg Army Base in North Carolina. I mention all that because The Rogue is Going to Extremes Redux. It’s a marketing platform. It’s not a book. In The Rogue Joe flies to Alaska and rents the house next door to Sarah and Todd Palin and their dysfunctional brood on the shore of Lake Lucille in Wasilla. Joe buys two arm chairs at a garage sale. Joe drives to Fairbanks. Joe visits Homer. Joe flies to Sitka. Joe’s wife comes for a visit. Joe packs up and flies home. That’s the narrative, which is of interest only in its odd passivity. Around the spine of that narrative The Rogue hangs snippets of information about Sarah Palin that Joe (or his research assistant?) plucked out of the thousands of newspaper and magazine articles that have been written about Sarah over the past three years, including several of mine. The Rogue also passes along rumors, innuendos, and first and secondhand hearsay that the various people Joe sought out passed along to him. Are those rumors, innuendos, and hearsay worth the $25 Joe and Random House want you to spend in order to read them? You can decide for yourself. But I don’t think so. So what if during the 1980s Sarah and Todd Palin snorted a line or two of cocaine off the top of an oil drum? As anyone, starting but hardly ending with me, who was there will tell you, in Alaska during the 1980s almost everyone Sarah and Todd Palin’s ages who had the money to do so did coke, including quite a few members of the Alaska Legislature and the late twenty and early thirty-something staff members who worked for them who occasionally coked up in public off lines they laid down on the tops of the tables at which they were sitting in the Latchstring, which until it burnt down in an arson, was the Legislature’s principal watering hole in the state capital. So Sarah’s recreational drug use during the 1980s was hardly aberrant. And so what if, as Joe tells us that one of her “friends” told him, when she was 23 and single Sarah fucked (according to Joe, Sarah’s word choice) a black college basketball star who was about her same age? Is it any of the world’s business who Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Michele Bachmann were fucking when they were single and 23? And what does whoever that may have been have to do with their qualifications to be President of the United States in 2012? But if The Rogue is to books what the Saw franchise is to movies, using the platform he has spent the past 40 years building to exploit Sarah Palin (who certainly deserves being exploited) for what this time around may be a seven figure payday, Joe McGinniss has done America an important service by including in The Rogue a description of the lunch Joe had with Gary and Corky Wheeler. Gary Wheeler is not a disgruntled Wasilla homeboy or one of Sarah’s unnamed “friends” who talked to Joe because they are embittered road kill who friend Sarah chewed up and then (to mix my metaphors) left gut-shot along the side of the Parks Highway that runs through Wasilla during her it-only-can-happen-in-America journey up the line from small town mayor to People magazine icon. Gary Wheeler is a retired Alaska State Trooper who provided security for Sarah during the two-plus years she served as Governor of Alaska, just as he had the two governors who preceded her. Spending hours of private face-time with Governor Palin gave Trooper Wheeler an opportunity to assess Sarah’s intellect, character, and temperament that few other people, and certainly not John McCain before he selected her as his vice presidential running mate, have had. If Sarah decides to run for President (which I’ve been betting that, when push finally comes to shove, she’s not going to do) Joe McGinniss is going to sell a lot more copies of The Rogue than the several tens of thousands he already has because Trooper Wheeler’s assessment of candidate Palin will be required reading. If you can’t wait until Sarah announces whether she’s running or not, go to Barnes & Noble, pull The Rogue down off the shelf, and read pages 137-142. I won’t spoil your fun other than to predict that if based on what you’ve seen of her over the past three years you suspect that Sarah Palin is a narcissistic and intellectually incurious sociopath Gary Wheeler will confirm your hunch. And for those of you who may not be able to get to your local Barnes & Noble before The Rogue sells out, I’ll pass along Trooper Wheeler’s bottom line. Which is that Sarah Palin’s “no mama grizzly; she’s a rabid wolf. Take a look at the snow: wherever she’s been, there’s a trail of blood in her wake.” So thanks Joe. That quote alone makes The Rogue worth every dollar that I have to fess up that I took my own advice and didn’t pay for it.
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US citizen and attacker killed after gunfire and blast heard at hotel used as base for office in Kabul A US citizen was killed in an attack on a hotel in Kabul used as a CIA office on Sunday. The attack was carried out by an Afghan employee who was also killed. Officials are still investigating what happened in an area with restricted access even for Afghan security forces. The Ariana hotel is just a few blocks away from the presidential palace and the US embassy, in a heavily guarded military and diplomatic enclave almost entirely inaccessible to casual visitors. Gunfire and a small blast were heard by Reuters witnesses a few hundred metres away late on Sunday. Kabul police chief, Ayub Salangi, said there had been an incident at the Ariana hotel, which he described as an “office” for the US government’s Central Intelligence Agency. He had no further information. Afghan security forces have only limited access to the area. The CIA and the US embassy in Kabul declined to comment. But a US official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation, confirmed an attack had been made against a US facility in Kabul. Access to the hotel has been restricted at least since the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001. Perhaps because of its proximity to the presidential palace, it was used by ruling regimes for years before that. Two weeks ago, militants launched an assault against the US embassy and Nato headquarters in Kabul. Top US officials including Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, blamed those attacks on the Haqqani network, a group of Afghan militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and said they were supported by Pakistan’s spy agency. Pakistani officials strongly denied any ISI connection to the Haqqani network or the previous attacks on Kabul. Afghanistan United States CIA guardian.co.uk
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