DRUNKEN SAILORS AND A JEWISH BIRTHDAY BOY

Couldn't help noticing that PC has reached a new height. A New York City councilman is demanding an apology from the mayor for his aide's use of the term "drunken sailor," because it denigrates the men and women in the Navy.

After the aide accused the council of "spending money like a drunken sailor" earlier this week, the councilman issued a press release claiming that the "slur against sailors" was "unacceptable" -- especially because it occurred on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor day.

The mayor wisely refused to apologize. He pointed out that when describing the council's spending "drunken sailor is about as nice a ways as you can phrase it."

Today, the same day that kerfluffel was reported in The New York Times, the paper's pop music critic Kelefa Sanneh called Jesus a Jewish "birthday boy" in his review of Clay Aiken's Christmas concert at the Theater in Madison Square Garden.

Sanneh writes that since the concert coincided with "the third night of Hanukkah, Mr. Aiken turned his second act into a celebration of Jews. Well, one Jew: Jesus. Whereas other seasonal gatherings evoked a secular or multifaith 'holiday spirit,' Mr. Aiken's concert was one party where the birthday boy got all the attention."

Will PC Christians and Jews demand an apology from Sanneh for his insouciant treatment of -- pick one, a) the son of God or b) the guy who was not the messiah -- and will the editors of the Times be excoriated for their insensitivity? And if he gets wind of this before his departure, what will Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent have to say?

Postscript: "Following up on your PC Christianity," a reader writes, "if Dan Brown is on to something and Jesus did marry Mary Magdalene, does that make her the daughter-in-law of God? If so, Mrs. Christ deserves her due. Renaming St. Patrick's Cathedral in her honor would be a healthy start, or a casino in Sin City. Maybe Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas strip?"

December 11, 2004 12:15 PM |

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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 December 11, 2004 12:15 PM.

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