GOOD LUCK TO THE LEMMINGS

Der Gropenfuhrer has assembled what columnist Jim Washburn calls a Dynamic Oligarchy to rule California's lemmings. "The beauty of Dynamic Oligarchy," Washburn writes, "is that it works where it's needed most. ... If you're an 'unfit' member of society struggling to meet your meek goals, it zeroes right in on you."

Washburn recalls seeing the Grope "crush a car with a wrecking ball" during his campaign for governor. "I'll never tire of his quote at the time, which ranks with Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine's best: 'In movies, I played a character that if I didn't like something, I destroyed it! I viped it out!'"

That's just what he's doing to education, health care and social services. "How did we know that the special interests Arnold was complaining about were our kids and our poor and ailing elderly?" Washburn asks. Nobody says the Grope's job is easy. But his so-called solutions to California's fiscal problems are heartless and no better than those of his predecessor, Gray Davis.

And how about George Pataki, New York's governor? He doesn't want to be left out of the running for heartless. To save New York state all of $9 million, he plans to cut assistance to the poor who are physically disabled. "In a state budget of more than $90 billion, the total savings would be minimal but at least 26,700 families could be affected," The New York Times reports this morning.

The report noted that those households "would lose $90 per month on average, according to an estimate provided in the proposal. For a family with a fixed monthly income of only several hundred dollars, that loss could have a significant impact, advocates for the poor said."

Nice, huh? That piece of cheery news comes just in time to celebrate today's federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 19, 2004 10:31 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on January 19, 2004 10:31 AM.

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