Crabby Putinesca
It is an amazing spring day here in New York City. Finally. The trees are leafing out, providing cover for the tattered, plastic Fairway bags lufting all winter in the bare tree branches. The yellow forsythia petals have given way to green leaf. The jonquils are past. But it is high bloom time for the flowering crab trees in Riverside Park. I wish I could freeze frame them, but their mutability is their poignant charm.
To reverse one of my favorite literature tropes, that old “pathetic fallacy” of the personification of inanimate objects, allow me to floral-ize myself. This long primary season, I am one flowering crab, but without the charm.
As the post-primary letdown sets in Pennsylvania and Keystone staters get back to actual bitterness, Indiana and North Carolina are now in the media spotlight. The big Good Sam Club RV map of where we’ve been will have the last magnetized states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, South Dakota and Montana all filled in by June 3. And then the gas-guzzling behemoth of the Democratic Party will trundle off to Colorado, the Rocky Mountain State and Denver.
Donner, party of one.
Unlike many of my friends, I am not cranky that the race goes on. I am not calling for Hillary to leave the race or for Bill to leave the human race. Okay, maybe the latter. I remind my impatient friends, this too is what democracy looks like. They haven’t seen it for seven and a half years, so they’re confused.
What I am most crabby appleton about is the media coverage. John King obsessively poking his military-inspired voting GPS system as Wolf looks on over his shoulder, slack-jawed, like a Cro-Magnon discovering fire.
Furrow-browed and deeply caring Rev. Bill Moyers hearing Jeremiah Wright’s confession.
Mary Matalin, not the one who can’t hear, the Matalin who doesn’t listen, tight-lipping her theory that the Democrats really don’t want to win the White House. They are more concerned with solidifying their hold on Congress. They could care less.
Well, I don’t care what Democrat wins the presidency; I just want her to appoint me as Media Czar. And I don’t mean the new nice kind of czar Bush appoints when he has no clue what to do. War Czar, for example. The place should be crawling with Katrina Czars, Gitmo Czars, Sub-Crime Mortgage Czar. I mean the old Russian crabby czars. Like Putin.
When the story broke that Putin was having an affair with a Russian Olympian, a gold medal gymnast in rhythmic gymnastics, he was asked about it at a press conference. His wife did not appear at his side. Putin, whose soul George had seen during a staring contest, waxed on creepily about how Russian women are the best, Italians second and then groused about people who with “infected noses” dig into other people’s private lives. Which was how he got his start.
The next day the reporter’s paper was shut down. The picture of the gymnast with the sole of her foot on the back of her head disappeared. No word on the poor guy who asked the question at the press conference.
That kind of Media Czar, but a little less gulagy. I would institute mandatory term limits on all pundits. I would make it illegal to use your own name in the title of a news show. I am hoping Rachel Maddow will agree to be my Deputy Czar.

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Hold up, let me just get this gun back in my gun rack. I had it out after Church. No, not to go see the His Extreme Narrowmindedness in New York. I’m not the kind of gal.
I know it’s not fair to take Barack Obama’s words out of context. I actually agree with him about the dreary economic dead-endedness many Americans feel. Grocery-buying, tank-filling, tax paying American citizens, unlike our faith-based economists, are realists. Class resentment is a bitter pill whether you swallow it with rods or religion.
But it’s Pennsylvannia pre-primary pounce time and mountains will be made. It’s not like Obama was wind-surfing off Nantucket. Roll tape of pick-up basketball game. Ixnay on the bowling footage.
Okay, I’ll take back the thing about the gun rack and church.
But don’t you be going after my Annie Oakley! Have you no decency?
I was raised on Little Miss Sure Shot. In my impressionable single digits, I watched her on TV. Hence the photos of everyone in the family pictures posed in civvies, except me. I’m in the red and black, fringed cowgirl shirt with holster tied to my right thigh with a piece of rawhide. You can’t see the rawhide, but it’s there.
Annie Oakley, whose offspring went on to make a fortune in high-price, sporty sunglasses, and the very sexually ambiguous fly-girl, Mary/Peter Martin/Pan, were my early role models. I never warmed up to the lives of the young Christian martyrs which were bedtime stories for the tween Ratzinger. To me, the stories of girl-martyrs having their eyes gouged out in early abstinence-only programs or boy-martyrs asking to be turned on the barbie for Jesus, were more unsettling than inspiring.
But Annie Oakley! She was one sharpshooter! She could split a playing card edge at 90 feet with a .22 caliber rifle. And put five or six more holes in it before it touched the ground. And dodge sniper fire from Wild Bill at the same time. And she never shot anyone in the face. I’m not sure about the last two.
Could our darling Dems please hold their fire at each other? I’m much more interested in how they intend to set their sights on John McCain who each day girds himself in more media-made Reagan Teflon than any Iraqi soldier was ever issued.
Enough with the sappy Compassion Forums. It’s time to get out to the target-practice range of our nation’s Rod and Gun Club and show us some sharp shooting. Whoever hits the most skeets wins all the super-delegates. Pull!

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Hillary Clinton is like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. She just keeps coming back for more. She’s a fighter and you’ve got to love that. No really, you’ve got to love that. Don’t make me have to come over there.
She hasn’t asked me, but I don’t think Hillary should get out of the race. I do think she should take maybe a couple of days off. Go down to Florida where the state motto translated from the Latin is: Florida, where your primary vote doesn’t count either. She should sit in the sun with a big straw hat on and read a big fat Danielle Steele book cover to cover. Chill.
Barack Obama went to the islands for Easter, heck, he couldn’t go to his old church, and he played some hoops while Hillary was trying to avoid non-sniper fire. Maybe rope-a-dope is his new strategy.
The campaign has gone on so long we’ve cycled through seasons of sports metaphors: the symbology of football Bowls, basketball bracketology, baseball spring training. Why stop before the Summer Olympics? The torch is on the way from Greece to China by way of Mt. Everest, through some got-nothing-to-lose monk riots. Let the games continue!
In a recent poll, and I don’t know about you, I can’t get enough of those recent polls, 38% of Democrats said that if their candidate isn’t the Presidential nominee they are going to vote for McCain. The poll was translated from scratchy Arabic on a cassette tape dropped off at CNN.
Based on that poll, everybody, even Fickle Friends of Hillary [FFOH] are calling for Hillary to get out of the race. I even heard someone invoke Tonya Harding. That is cold. Hey, we’ve come this far in the presidential marathon, why make Hillary pull a reverse Rosie Ruiz?
Fighters are made better by good sparring partners. Tennis players improve by with hard-hitting practice partners. My niece, who doesn’t get a lot of game time, takes her role in practice on her division-leading college lacrosse team very seriously.
If Barack Obama thinks the Clintons are relentless, petty and dirty double-teamers, I’m sure there’s a Yogi Berra saying that applies here to indicate that he ain’t seen nothing yet.
McCain is a reckless kamikazi for freedom. He has the grudging support of his fellow Republicans and their machine. McCain also has the full-larynxed support of the media boys he’s curried for years. They love his ass.
The Loserland television networks are invested in keeping the campaign going, despite their disingenuous goading of Hillary to quit. They say do the delegate math. There’s no way. They must have forgotten what Harvard’s Larry Summers said about women and math.
Like the print media, the networks are hemorrhaging audience to the Internet. This is their last campaign hurrah. And they desperately want to elect one more president for the Gipper.
So Obama/Michael Douglas quit your whining. Hillary is doing you a favor. Don’t be caught flat-footed. Get your cup on. Wear your head and mouth gear.
And watch for her knock out punch.

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Don’t ask. I’m a 60 year old white woman with the last name Clinton. How do you think I feel?
Please do not tell me your long night of the soul “Let this cup pass from me, Oprah” story about when you decided to switch from Hillary to Obama. I do not feel your pain.
Please do not send me that “Good-bye to All That Part II” Robin Morgan piece. It’s brill, but it reminds me of one of those desperate prayer chain letters. When you haven’t got a prayer. Besides, I am the weakest link in chain letters.
When I ask you a simple question, like “Can we get to 42nd Street in this traffic?”, please don’t breathlessly bug-eye me with, “Yes we can!” Sheesh.
Like the new Lexus, I have pre-collision intelligence, so I didn’t watch the last Democratic debate. My partner did. Actually she switched back and forth between American Idol with Simon Cowell and American Idol with Tim Russert. At least my partner didn’t announce to everyone that if I didn’t do well in Ohio and Texas, I wouldn’t have a chance.
I put on her new BOSE headset, cranked up Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and did the crossword puzzle.
Did I miss anything?
Obama won? Wow, I so did not see that one coming.
I’ve been thinking about returning to my radical lesbian separatist roots. Get back to the land. Get off the grid. Get some flannel shirts and patchooli at Urban Outfittters. Okay, maybe not that far back. But I have been re-reading my favorite feminist thinkers.
Like contemporary French Feminist philosopher, Monique Wittig. She said that heterosexuality is a political regime in which “woman” exists only through her relation to the category “man”. Between Gauloises, she called for the abolition of gender categories and boldly proclaimed that lesbians are not women.
Aha! My mistake was wanting a woman president. Next time I will be much more specific. I want a lesbian president, who is not beholden to a man or the derivative, woman. Think Mike Bloomberg, but vive la difference. He bought the NYC mayoralty fair and square so he did not owe anyone anything. That allowed him to go after smokers, small-gun toters and trans fats.
Shiva is the paradoxical god of opposites. What is the opposite of cynicism of despair but the audacity of hope. Where is Christine Quinn? Get me Tammy Baldwin’s number.

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Curb Your Cynicism
My partner and I of twenty years – we can’t get married in New York State, even though a New York State appeals court just ruled our state must recognize out-of-state marriages – go to our local elementary school to vote in the primary.
The school is justly beloved for its dynamic principal, innovative curriculum, parental involvement and special needs program. With all manner of wheelchairs and walking devices, the first floor looks like Lourdes. It is a victim of its success, and so overcrowded, it has had to move many special programs out of the school.
We walk past the PTA Moms hawking baked goods for the school. “The croissants are low-fat.” We give them a ten, but don’t take anything. They are chirpingly grateful.
We walk into a steamy, Dianne Arbus low-ceilinged inner room, smelling faintly of green sawdust and cooked cabbage. I’m hoping that since it is early, the election officials are still just getting their system down. We are the fourth and fifth voters from our district.
The older woman I am directed to doesn’t hear or see that well and seems flummoxed with the multi-tasking of finding “Clinton” on her list – “Can you spell it?” – and assigning me a number. Five. The big lever to open the voting booth curtain is jammed. I cast my vote for someone who will have to deal with global warming, gay issues, education, aging issues, the economy, voting reform. And that war.
We vote, walk out and breathe deeply. We walk by a young woman by the playground fence, at the mandatory distance from the polling place, surreptitiously murmuring “Hillary” and passing out home made fliers like they were nickel bags. A woman with a regulation Obama placard stands in silent vigil across the street.
This Super Tuesday, it’s Carnival in other parts of the world. In the US, it’s the national semi-finals of American Idol and there is a late surge by a talented young man who can kick out a speech like nobody’s business. The handsome business cardboard cutout of a guy is lip-syncing Ronald Reagan. The white haired vet is cracking straight jokes. No matter the talents of the woman contestant, she is to be judged by Survivor rules.
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. I am going to daub a big bindi of ash on my furrowed brow and try to give up cynicism for Lent.

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The brilliant journalist Barbara Ehrenreich opined recently [http://www.alternet.org.story/74595] and hilariously, “With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you’d think that the economy is a giant clitoris.” She says in “Clitoral Economics” that the challenge for the Fed’s Ben Bernanke is “how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.”
Ain’t gonna happen with that stubbly beard.
While the island of Manhattan fantasizes itself the epi-center of the financial world and does indeed look clitoral nestled between the vulvar folds of New Jersey and Long Island, this economy has nothing to do with that sweet bud of pleasure.
This economy, shrunken from an addiction to the steroids of tax cuts, a dependence on the acujack of sub-prime mortgages and the Viagra of war spending, is more penile than clitoral. How’s that for a gender card? And what goes up must come down. Except that we’ve been the main party animal/sex addict at the global orgy and when we step out of the daisy chain to get some lube or take a nap, everybody gets freaked.
This is so much fun. I’ve got a million of ‘em. Is that a stimulus package or are you just happy to see me? You know the wide stance joke is coming. If it’s been up more than four years, call your doctor.
Unless it’s President Curveball. Instead of putting money into unemployment insurance, or into states to help them balance budgets, which they must do, unlike some people I know, George is giving everybody a parting rebate check, like it’s his money he’s throwing around. And he’s giving that post-911 spiel about going out and buying more mountains of things. It’s patriotic.
Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or burn the furniture.

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