"baby wrangler": actual profession

The windows are all open and the sounds from some do out at Telus Field are drifting over the river valley. All the hicks are out on their balconies because the band that's playing is covering Tragically Hip and the Trews (imagine covering the Trews! it's like wearing a McDonald's uniform at Denny's. Or that shot in "Citizen Kane" where Orson walks through the mirrored hallway, except with shitty expensive draft beer.) I've been feeling a bit Sid Vicious all day so I yelled out the window at some whooping jocks from the Masters Games to shut up. Not that I really wanted them to, I just felt like yelling at someone. Luckily I was ignored.

My old band once played a festival in the parking lot of a brand new Bo Diddley's Steakhouse or whatever the fuck. There were Bud girls and a car you could pay five bucks to smash with a mallet. I (you know, I was the singer) told the crowd that if we wanted to we could secede from the nation and start our own country.

"We could totally do it. We have local industry -"

- points at the car -

"- we have a fully functional correctional system already in place -"

- gestures at the dunk tank -

"- and we have law enforcement."

- points at a Bud girl.

Nobody laughed. Maybe I'd started some gears spinning in those Harley-Davidson heads. Maybe the place was a powder keg waiting for a match. Maybe I was seconds away from a riot-incitement rap to beat.

Now they're playing the song about the guy seeing his smiling face on the cover of the Rolling Stone. The singer asks if everyone is ready for the big ending, and the band proceeds to whomp on the same chord five, maybe six times. No applause.

Things are still tough out there, I see.

It's hard to entertain the jocks. Now it's Sweet Home Alabama.

How do Alabamanians feel when they're abroad and they hear that song? Do they feel flush with stately pride, or are they a little perturbed that someone is claiming their turf for the purpose of shilling some insanely dumb three-chord albatross onto an apathetic baseball field of hemorrhoid sufferers? I'd feel weird about it if I were them. Plus now that we know who Deep Throat is, is that Watergate-does-not-bother-me line really appropriate? Was it ever? Don't you want to just hit somebody when you hear them sing that line? Karaoke, anything?

God knows I do.

Read Seymour Hersh's piece about Mark Felt in the new Harpers. Hersh's tone is so despondent he almost makes me laugh except I know he's serious like melanoma.

Okay, maybe this'll help. The Metro is running a festival of Nicholas Ray films (the guy who made Rebel Without a Cause.) I watched something called In a Lonely Place with Humphrey Bogart, one of Ray's earlier films. Bogart's character's name is Dixon Steele, I swear to you. Wasn't too bad, really. But that name, man. I wanna get it printed up on a banner and stretch it across our balcony.

In the movie, Bogart plays a screenwriter who hasn't had a hit for awhile. One night at a bar he's offered a chance to adapt a best-selling book he hasn't read, and gets the bar's hat check girl (who has read it) to come over to his place and tell him the story. Later that night the hat check girl is murdered and Steele's the prime suspect. While all this is happening, he meets and falls in love with the woman whose apartment faces his, as played by Gloria Grahame, with a lot of Maidenform stuff going on. At first the relationship is great, lots of snappy old-movie banter going on. But as the investigation escalates, their relationship is tested. She - and we- begin to seriously doubt his innocence as his violent tendencies start to show. It's an interesting take on the noir form - it focuses more on the strained romance than on the investigation that sets it all in motion.

Hersh's basic point is - wait. Why do cover bands always save "I Wanna Rock and Roll all Night" for the last song of the night? It's like if my drinking buddies met me at the bar and grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled into my ear "Hey, dude, let's drink our faces off tonight! See you later!"

Hersh's point is that what Nixon and his cronies were brought down for is comparatively tame as held up to today's administration's records. He's flummoxed, you can tell by his language - absolutely flummoxed at the apathy towards the Bush gang's making shit up to entangle the U.S. in an illegitimate war. That was the public's main problem with Nixon, he posits. The taping, the espionage, all that kind of stuff had been done in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It was the massive loss of life in Vietnam that sped the plow of the impeachment. People were angry that the man who'd made the decision to escalate American presence was an amoral bloodthirsty paranoiac. Someone like that, they felt, should not be in charge.

So why, knowing what we do about this year's model, are we putting up with them? Why is it okay for Bush to enlarge the American presence to violent effect in Iraq when it wasn't for Nixon thirty-some years ago?

Of course this is a pretty ham-fisted paraphrasing (read the thing) but what it's leading me to is this. Dig:

Dixon Steele's public displays of aggression are at first presented as possibly defensible because the persons he visits them upon are instigators. He nearly beats a belligerent motorist to death for almost running him off the road. He slaps his agent in the face over a restaurant table for taking his script without permission. But when he faces the fact that Laurel is running away from him, he threatens her - and the phone call that clears his name in the murder comes too late to salvage her love for him.

What got Nixon up the creek with his electorate wasn't the fact that he dug in the military's heels in a train wreck of a war and decimated a countryside with napalm, it was more that he did so much of it clandestinely, and also clandestinely sought to discredit anyone who dared to say it was a horrible thing to do. It wasn't the violence. It was the secrecy of the violence that lent it the colour of illegitimacy. The American people felt they'd been disrespected.

Laurel leaves Dixon not for beating a guy's face to a pulp with his fists and nearly finishing the job with a rock - come on, girls, you'd be gone about then - but waits until she is the object upon which he's going to let loose next. One grimacing bearhug from ol' snaggletooth and that's the last dog hung, thank you very much.

What is it about violence that is acceptable in broad daylight, when the rumours of violence are so damaging? What finally ends Laurel's feelings for Dixon isn't so much the actual verifiable evidence of antisocial assholity as it is the lingering doubt - did he kill that girl? Nixon, too, went down not in the swirling maelstrom of napalm and Da Nang, but in the jacuzzi of the suspicion of those who were supposed to be in his corner, or at least in the same business as he was.

Bush is untouchable because everyone knows everything. When every unspeakable thing is public domain, there is no dirt to get on the guy. Hersh did his part by breaking Abu Ghraib, but (and here's where I understand his despondency) it seems like there's not enough people left who want to care about stuff like that. Because what we want is dirt. And the only dirt left is Brangelina.