Revenge of the Elderly Black Grandmother-Tang Clan
Dear Merrill,
Greetings and salutations once again from Madison, Wis., America's (after
Austin, Tex.) Second City of Slack. As difficult as this may be for you to
believe, I'm actually finding myself jealous of your Bo, Winkie, et al., and
wishing I had my own four-dog-strong 6:15 wake-up squad of bounding,
tail-wagging quadrupeds to help me out here. A creeping fear worries me that,
being a person who normally thinks of breakfast as something you get at a
24-hour waffle place after the bars close, perhaps I'm just not cut out for the
whole pithy-morning-punditry-duties thing. Now I feel like I know firsthand
just how awful it must be for a person to greet each new dawn with the
heart-wrenching realization that they are neoconservative MSNBC talk-show host
Laura Ingraham.
The Dalai Llama must be feeling particularly serene this morning with the
news that, after a marathon negotiation session of 11 th -hour
meetings, the way is finally paved for China to enter the World Trade
Organization. Everybody seems really happy about this, since it came through at
the last minute despite longtime stumbling blocks in the way of such an
agreement. Perhaps China threatened to electrocute their testicles and beat
their families black and blue if they couldn't push the agreement through?
Let's hear it for effective diplomacy.
You mentioned yesterday about being filled with repellent hatred and
loathing? Yesterday the Journal and today again the Times had
front-page pieces on how utterly stupid and pathetic and evil and beneath the
dignity of any halfway civilized human being (OK, so they didn't necessarily
use those exact words) the whole "managed" health-care system is. To me, this
is like running a front-page article on how "Everybody's Breathing Air This
Fall TV Season," or the headline "Night Still Following Day for Record
Umpteenth Gazillion Straight Week." I realize this is hardly an insightful
observation on my part; after all, the same point has been made by any number
of commentators before me, including my mother, the guy who works at the liquor
store down the street, and virtually every human being who lives in an even
remotely first-world country, but nonetheless whenever I think about this I
just want to hit an HMO administrator on the head with a rock until it dies.
Then there's the added insult to untreated ER waiting-room injury of having to
watch these Satanic sentimental TV spots for various HMOs, featuring grainy
handheld pseudo-documentary sepia-tone footage of some hypothetical
multi-ethnic customer base (elderly black grandmothers on rocking chairs with
blankets draped over their knees and beaming Asian-American 6-year-olds on
swing sets always seem to make an appearance) while muted piano music plays and
some studio-musician faux-gospel vocalist breathily intones the company
slogan/musical sound bite, informing us all "(Insert Name of HMO here) ... We
care about yooouuu ..." I mean, why not just come right out and sing, "We're
lying ... and we're not even trying to hide that fact from yooouuu ..." and be
done with it? Who are they fooling, do they think? It's like the spots were
produced by some Orwellian Ministry of Information. I wish that Old Dirty
Bastard and the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan had celebrated his birthday by
mobilizing the relatives of all those elderly black grandmothers to start
snapping some HMO ad-exec necks.
Um, I'm becoming consumed by bile here, so I think I'd better go hose myself
down or something. Oh, and regarding your last letter's comment about Gore
pinning Bradley to the floor and lying on top of him, its a good idea, but
somehow I don't think it'd work, because that's obviously what Tipper's been
doing to Al herself since their first teen-age (but presumably non-rock 'n'
roll concert) date.
From hell,
Todd
