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Monday, September 13, 2004 More astounding insight from star writer Andrew Foster Altschul: Opening Day Dear Steve, Yesterday, my beloved New York Giants opened their season with a 31-17 ass-drubbing at the hands of the Philadelphia Eagles. Now, every thinking person knows that the Giants are a better team than the Eagles - they are one of football's class acts, steeped in history, with two Super Bowl victories and photos of some of football's greatest legends hanging in their locker room. The Eagles, on the other hand, are a gang of degenerates, a ragtag assortment of undisciplined and nasty thugs who've never really amounted to anything. They give football, and all sport, a bad name. Everyone agrees on this. And yet, for the last few years, the Eagles have regularly kicked the shit out of the Giants, making my boys in blue look confused and dispirited, as if they've lost their faith in themselves. There's a good reason for this: the Eagles are mean. They don't play by the rules. It's not clear that they even know the rules. They certainly couldn't read or write them. What they do know is a single-minded obsession with winning, at any cost. They know that putting that mark in the W column is much more important than looking pretty or earning anyone's respect, and that usually it isn't the team with the best vocabulary or the most winning smiles that gets to go to the championship in January. The Eagles are willing to bite, kick, trip, poke, clip, hack, chop, crack, taunt, and spit to get the ball and run with it. They are willing to break defenders' kneecaps when they stand between them and the end zone. They laugh at the yellow flag when it flutters from the referee's pocket. They make dirty, vicious, illegal hits on unprotected receivers, they crush vertebrae and break ribs and rupture Achilles' tendons - and then they sit around the locker room watching the tape and high-fiving. The Philadelphia Eagles are the lowest species of human, and they will almost certainly win the NFC East this year. You've got to love them. What I'm trying to say here is that the pre-season is over. The conventions have passed, Labor Day has passed, and seven weeks from tomorrow the U.S. electorate is going to choose between George W. Bush - the most dishonest, shameless, immoral, greedy, hypocritical, stupid, vicious man ever to sit in the Oval Office a and... um... what's that other dude's name again? And from where I sit, things are looking pretty grim. Since the airbrushed and bounceless Democratic convention, John Kerry has sat complacently back while a parade of scumbags and psychopaths have taken their potshots at him. He has withstood the betrayals of a close friend (John McCain), responded to insinuations and outright libels with a relaxed, aristocratic cool which even pisses me off - just imagine how it plays in Cleveland. Actually, you don't have to imagine it: Look at the latest Ohio polls. Now, after watching his numbers plummet like a Tiki Barber fumble, Kerry is "shaking up" his campaign, bringing in ringers like James Carville to breathe some fire into things. And it sure is working - last week, the leaner, meaner Kerry introduced a new line in his stump speech, a comment so laser-like in its diagnosis, so cutting in its rhetoric, so utterly convincing that you can almost hear the Diebold machines switching their electronic votes from red to blue: "The W in George Bush's name stands for 'Wrong'!" And today, in response to two years of lying and manipulation by the Bush administration, which has relentlessly tied Iraq to September 11, John Edwards sniffled, "Vice President Cheney should not say the kind of things he said Friday and the president should not mislead the American people." I'm sure Dick and W. feel duly chastened. Look, this is not going to get it done. Somebody has got to explain to the Kerry campaign that this is a bloodsport. It is a fight to the death, and there's no referee, and no holds barred, and if you whine to the American people about how dirty your opponent is playing they are going to laugh at you and think you're a wimp and they are going to vote for the dirty guy. This tendency has certainly been amplified since the "War on Terror" began, but God knows it didn't start there - so the Democrats have absolutely no excuse for the off-balance, pouty-lipped torpor with which they have responded. The Republicans sit in their War Room and laugh; they get inside Kerry's head by saying, "The American people don't want a negative, angry campaign," and Kerry actually believes them and tries to fight nice, and the Republicans proceed to sucker punch and groin kick and make jokes about his mother. And the electorate eats it up. Steve, where is the opposition? Bush has a whole stable of surrogates out there pounding Kerry on a daily basis. Tom Ridge puts the whole country on alert, Colin Powell takes over the Sunday Morning talk shows, Condi Rice and Bill Frist look reporters in the eye and repeat lies which were disproven months ago - and meanwhile, Bill Clinton is under anesthesia and John Edwards is taking his ball and going home. It's time for the Democrats to start giving as good as they get. If they don't bump up their rhetoric and get the public's attention again - and soon - they are going to lose. Period. And if they lose in 2004, it's hard to see how it doesn't spell the end of this party, and maybe the end of the American left for the next generation. I don't care what surveys say. Dirty campaigning works - and there never was a more vulnerable candidate than George Bush. Kerry needs to start reminding voters that they have been lied to - not "manipulated," not "misled"or "finessed," lied. As in: "George Bush has lied to the American people about every important event and policy in the last few years." As in, "George Bush lied to the military and to his commanding officers in the National Guard when he went A.W.O.L. in a time of war." As in, "George Bush has ruined the careers of respected Americans like Colin Powell by ordering them to lie to the American people, lie to the United Nations, and lie to the world about weapons of mass destruction which George Bush knew all along did not exist." As in, "George Bush has lied about education reform, lied about helping senior citizens buy prescription drugs, lied about revealing the identity of undercover C.I.A. agents, lied in the State of the Union Address - his sacred covenant with the American people! - lied about the cost of Medicare reform, lied about his military service, and lied about the reasons he sent 1,000 Americans to die. He is a pathological liar, he cannot be trusted, and he is unfit to lead this great nation." Take it from a long-time writing teacher: It's all in the verbs. How about, "George Bush has betrayed the American people and American ideals"? How about, "George Bush has ruined America's standing in the world and made us a target for hatred and terror"? How about, "George Bush has swindled Americans and sent their children to die in Iraq so that Dick Cheney's old company could have a no-bid contract"? How about, "George Bush has destroyed 100 years of environmental policy so that the Enrons of the world could make money off of pollution and not even pay taxes on it"? How about, "When the American people needed George Bush to be on the job, he was Missing In Action, so obsessed with Iraq he has let Iran and North Korea go nuclear and threaten our children"? How about, "On every promise George Bush made in 2000, he has gone AWOL"? Too much? Not even close. Kerry has got to get over this idea that Americans respond to integrity, geniality, and noblesse oblige. I mean, Jesus, look at Al Gore – the guy's teaching at more college campuses than I am. Americans, now more than ever, respond to force. They respond to passion and conviction and steely-jawed certainty. They respond to the cheapest, most predictable kind of sloganeering and cant and there needs to be a chorus of Democrats using the same phrasebook to hammer it home day after day. Am I happy about this? Does it make me proud to be an American? Who the fuck cares? Remember when you bet me ten bucks that Kerry would win in a landslide, Steve? Wanna go double? It's game time, Steve. Now or never. Within the next two weeks, barring some kind of catastrophic October surprise, we'll know who is going to win in November (or rather, we'll know who'll get the most votes). It's time for Kerry and Edwards to stop trying to be everyone's buddy, to stop being the teacher's pets, and to show the electorate that they want to win this election - they want it so bad they could chew through a crowbar. They want it so bad they're willing to sound angry and risk a sneer or two from time to time. It's time for them to get off their snowboards, put away their Crest Whitening Strips, and start tearing out their opponents jugulars with their teeth. Think Ultimate Fighting. Think Eagles-Giants. Think Rome. It's not pretty, but neither is winning. afa ** note from Steve: yes you chickenshit, I will go double posted by Andrew Foster Altschul 11:53 AM | link | |
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"Any true love story, if told with the urgency and animal intelligence of love, isn't for the fainthearted. On every page of this profound, distilled work of art, Stephen Elliott wrestles with the unknown and unspoken essences of love, and articulates that unknown so beautifully, with such clear-eyed fearlessness... Imagine a glass of pure water with one drop of blood hanging in its center, about to dissolve... Then drink it and be transformed." -Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City "There's an emotional courage to these stories, and a sense of urgency, that are thrilling to encounter. Elliott writes as if his life depended on each sentence. It is not overstating the case to say that he does for the BDSM community in this book what Denis Johnson did for lost druggies in Jesus' Son." - Steve Almond, The Believer Magazine Best of the year: Salon.com, San Francisco Chronicle Reviews: Salon.com, LA Weekly, The Believer Excerpts: My Stripper Year, Just Always Be Good Purchase from Amazon, Powells, Cleis, and your local bookstore 
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"Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Richard Ben Cramer: the great, all-American genre of the political campaign in extenso (and in extremis) has had its Homers and Boswells. To that list we can now add Stephen Elliott. Hilarious, strange, electrifyingly written, and heart-pumpingly idealistic, Looking Forward to It wins every literary caucus and primary in a landslide." -Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea Best of the year: Village Voice Reviews: New York Magazine, New York Times Excerpts: The Dennis Kucinich Polka, A John Edwards Almanac Purchase from Amazon, Powell's (cheap!), and your local bookstore 
"A Life Without Consequences was harrowing, hard as nails, brutal, and soaring. Stephen Elliott has to be watched, because he knows things almost no one else could." - Dave Eggers, author of A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius and What Is The What Excerpt: Adlai Stevenson House Reviews: Austin American Statesman Purchase from Amazon |
