Joe Six-Pack 4, Cunning Chinaman 7

'The Common Man' sounds too nineteenth century. 'Everyman' sounds too medieval. 'Working Class' sounds too Marxist, and 'The Average Man' sounds boring and vaguely insulting.

Enter 'Joe Six-Pack.' (And exeunt all those of us with weak stomachs.)

I reason that it's because there are not as of yet literal corporate Presidential Campaign sponsors; otherwise 'Willy Wal-Mart' would have been employed and a special logo created. But while I am uncertain as to how ballot-happy the Ralph Cramdens, Fred Murtzes, Hank Hills, and Stanley Kowalskis of the world (the nearly-extinct demographic of typical-blue-collar Americans I believe Ms. Palin is attempting to evoke) actually are, I do know that however few remain of their species, owning a foam-fronted John Deere cap does not perforce make one a beer drinker nor, conversely, is beer drinking diagnostic of familiarity with power tools.

This makes it a stupid thing to say.

Let us breeze through Prohibition and run headlong into the First Great Depression. In 1933 a grape farmer in the San Joaquin Valley, mired in debt and no longer able to sell his grapes, shoots his wife and then himself. Two of his sons, Ernest and Julio, with less than $6,000, rise from this tragedy, start a winery and change drinking in the United States. The Gallos were successful from the start, owing as much to their complementary skills and temperaments as to their mutual willingness to devote all they had to the enterprise.

The Depression ended, but the 'misery market' remained. In 1957, Gallo introduced 'Thunderbird,' a sweet, fortified, citrusy white wine sold at a low price and, at 17.5 alcohol by volume, rather more tailored toward rapid intoxication than slow savoring. Legend has it that after sales took off, Ernest Gallo, the business and marketing wizard of the pair, would assess the brand's fame and success in its target market by being driven to bad parts of town and yelling out part of Thunderbird's slogan to people drinking from paper bags on the street. 'What's the word?' Gallo would yell, to which the legendary happy hobo would shout back, 'Thunderbird!' 'How's it sold?' 'Good and cold!' And thus arose the first chink in the elitist-wine-snob vs. earthy beer drinker binarism: it doesn't get much more earthy than strong hooch with a screw-top in a paper bag being drunk by a guy with toenails longer than my hair.

But the Gallo revolution didn't end there. Nor were its effects confined to their brand. By the 1970s all sorts of jug red wines, and sweet wines like the Gallos' fruit-flavored Boone's Farm (with real plastic fruit around the neck!) and Ripple were drunk happily all over the US by millions of (often heretofore beer-drinking) middle-class citizens wanting something 'special' with dinner but fearing tannins, texture, and strong flavor. 'White Zinfandel' emerged, as did peach-flavored wines, strawberry-flavored wines, then 'wine coolers' in bottles, and the 'wine spritzer' in bars. Anyone could drink wine -- and it could go down smooth like a soda pop, too!

Meanwhile, as wine lost its elitist status thanks to the foresight and hard work of the Gallos, two other things happened: California emerged as a world-class center of serious viniculture and winemaking, and artisan beermaking took off. Most American supermarkets now have reasonable wine selections, and a US consumer can walk away with a brilliant bottle for under fifteen dollars (or stick with a Mondavi 'White Zin' at probably half the price). Likewise there are now millions of beer bores and beer snobs whose soporific conversational tendencies and level of affectation could rival that of any beret-wearing oenophilic epicure.

So: may we please let Joe Six-Pack rest in peace, along with Scarlett O'Hara, Rosie the Riveter, Ward and June Cleaver, the Femme Fatale, the Simple but Wise Peasant, the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, the Lazy Mexican, the Crafty Jew, the Cunning Chinaman, the Effete Englishman, and the Drunken Paddy? Please??? And someone hand me my Gueuze, please: I can't stand young hops, and I can't bear anything but wild-fermented beers, you know.

Politics for Grownups

This autumn night
Dawns, yet unaware
An insect sings on-
Just as am I,
Is he sunk in sadness?

Another thing that struck me in the brief Jon Stewart-Peggy Noonan interview was Mr. Stewart's visceral frustration at politicians' meretricious use of slogans, catch-words, and symbols as stand-ins for defined terms, argument, truth, or clarity. I believe two examples he gave were Conservative pack-mules 'legislating from the bench' and 'strict constructionist.' These could mean all sorts of things, but in practice are code for rather specific anathemas and goals. As Stewart pointed out, rather than risk alienating some groups of voters by railing against gay marriage, a candidate can remain in good stead with both his more Conservative core and moderate voters by espousing his distaste for the first and his fondness for the latter. A major point in Noonan's book is that the bulk of the American populace, regardless of political views, is as angry at being talked down to in this fashion as is Stewart.

And I think this is part of Sarah Palin's appeal. Unlike 'managed' and 'handled' long-time 'insiders,' she says what she thinks. She may get flustered, she may not always make sense, but until recently, when her logorrhea and lack of self-censorship became blunted by those same managers and handlers, she could be relied upon at least part of the time to say what she meant. I don't mean to say that she any more than the rest of us always acted in accord with her values, but she was largely upfront about them and the extent to which they informed her decisions. Nor do I mean that she was entirely unsophisticated politically or did not sometimes choose her public words judiciously, but her back-country candor, her physical expressiveness, and her fitted pink jackets undoubtedly do seem fresh, and more 'real' than the blandly and painstakingly contrived 'brands' of other national figures.

Perhaps tonight in the VP debate, with Palin's recent intensive training and the 90-second limit on responses, she will say as little of what she means as anyone else. She may even have a new more 'professional' haircut and style. Perhaps those ghastly faltering interviews with their exaggerated expressions and gestures and the incoherent strings of 'talking points' were a necessary intermediary step between her original shoot-from-the-hip/ take-no-prisoners/'Joe-Six-Pack' upfrontness, and she will now be ready to respond to any and all questions in a perfectly-clear and meaning-bereft coherent iteration of the same populist 'talking points' minus the nose-wiggle and the finger-licking, but with added 'y'alls' and more consistently dropped terminal G's. Should she remain on the national stage, whether the point is reached tonight or later, she will eventually be able to say as little in as many words as anyone else -- but succeed in doing so with appropriate punctuation and breath stops.

I enjoy subtlety in the right places as much as the next person. But this isn't Edo Japan, and foreign policy can hardly be confused with a lone heron on a foggy marsh. Evocation is not called for: clarity and direct speech are. I don't want synechdoche or stand-ins; I want facts, actual positions, and exposition! It doesn't matter to me in the slightest who pulled whom up by whose bootstraps -- or whether there were bootstraps involved in anyone's 'narrative' at all. I am not a medieval Japanese, and neither are you, so a symbol-ridden terse tanka is of no use to me whatever in parsing your actual stance on a specific issue. God help me, I, as much as anyone else, support 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'democratic values,' 'rights,' and wish the best for the 'American taxpayer' and the 'American Dream' - but from my espousal of these abstract concepts here you still have no idea in what way I believe they are to be defined, pursued, implemented, or served. Like a bugling stag weary in the browned bush-clover, or a departing goose calling a distant farewell, the autumn mountains echo with my mournful cry: Say something, one of you, any of you, that isn't fully, patently, abhorrently inane!

The Bidding Starts at $.99! (act now?)

From EBay:

'Description

This is a one of a kind Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus Cheetos! See how she is holding baby Jesus and looking down at him. It also looks like an angel. Depends on how you look at it. Now is your chance to own this rare and unique religious collectable! Approx. 1 1/2 inches long.

Good Luck and Happy Bidding!'

Kaneohe, HI

Don't Ask Me; Ask Google

What the?! I'm no. 2 on Google if you enter 'Lorca Thamar Amnon.' I mean, not that a great many people would enter 'Lorca Thamar Amnon' besides me, practically no one, really, and fewer still in English, in which nearly all the very, very few people wanting something with those three names would enter 'Lorca Tamar Amnon,' but I wanted to get back to that other site so I did, but with English as my default language. And found myself as well as the other guy. My entry also has 'sexuality' as a tag on Google somehow; maybe that's how you get to the heady heights of Number Two-ness.

Don't worry: despite my newfound fame, prestige, and power, I'm still the same simple country girl you've always known. And I will not let my smoldering search-engine sexuality overcome my good sense, either.

But what shoes, what shoes to wear to class tonight? They need to reflect such grand status, clearly, yet at the same time bespeak my unbesmirchable humility in the face of such worldly accolades. Perhaps the pointy pink slingbacks with the diminutive kitten heels? With a light taupe hose?

'Joy Is Not in Things; It Is in Us,'

said Richard Wagner and perhaps, in his staunch Teutonicity, dying in Venice sufficed and he never regretted not having built a 'sun-drenched Tuscan villa' in Bayreuth. It doesn't matter; it isn't 'Tuscany' that is the problem. The houses, and their bathrooms, and their greatrooms, their wall treatments, thematic toilet-brush holders, disguised three-car garages, incongruous media centers and 'authentic details' could all equally well be replaced by 'Hobbit' or 'Siheyuan' or 'Iroquois Longhouse' style with the principle remaining the same. Part of the problem, as I mentioned before, is the lack of hope these buildings signify, but there are other disturbing aspects.

Yes, in a perverse sense, these homes are all about hope, or American optimism, at least in its basest form. They are a testament to material success, to the fulfillment, in all caps, of The American Dream of home ownership. But what appears to me bleak in this reading is the notion that anyone's American Dream reaches its dramatic finale in a tract home rather than an alpaca farm in the mountains or a high-tech ultra-green penthouse condo or a craftsman bungalow with a beautifully, lovingly, tended garden. Your visitors will know you have money -- but will they suspect you have a soul?

A more troubling aspect for me is that the 'Tuscan' home and all its necessary 'Tuscan' appurtenances represent the recent widespread conflation of 'lifestyle' with Life, which then gave rise to the current tendency to disprivilege or ignore the latter in favor of the more comprehensible and convenient former. The problem with Life, I suspect, is that invariably it must be lived. We fall into it sodden with drool and incontinence, often leave it in much the same manner, and in between --

Well, in between we stammer at countless beginnings, stare at the creeping minute hand through lots of tedious middles and cry to ourselves over unfortunate endings; we get punched, sacked, ridiculed, betrayed, lied to, and cut off mid-sentence just before brilliant ripostes. We give our hearts away, we sing babies to sleep, we take up astronomy, then Jung, then Uilleann pipes; we take photographs lest we forget it really was just that beautiful, once. We have one too many, we don't get the promotion, we sit on the edge of the dance floor waiting; we practice kissing with a pillow and proposing with a mirror, we sometimes get the girl and we sometimes get the grippe.

None of that can be purchased. Much of it wouldn't be a very good deal, anyway, at any price, and I suppose that is the point: better to try to ignore it, and then perhaps the breathtaking crescendo of life, what all those clogged sinuses and broken heels and soothing kisses have been leading up to - death, in other words - might get distracted and not disturb us, after all. Life can be boring, painful, taxing, and too long or too short. And it always ends poorly.

Lifestyle, by contrast, is a narrative the user can control. It begins and ends as you wish, and you can leave out any of the parts that don't suit your desired image. Lifestyle, moreover, is nothing but a commodity, and an imaginary one at that. It consists in the things a consumer buys to convey to others and to himself the persona he wishes to inhabit. It is cosmetic surgery for your life, and just as there is a code of conduct regarding what should and should not be said to the obviously pulled, pleated, and plumped, so, too, will your posture as suburbia-dwelling daimyo, pasha, doge, or Indian Chief remain unquestioned by your neighbors. After all, you didn't neglect to include thematic outlet covers.

I suppose part of the problem for me is that it's just all so rickety. They are in the main not nice houses, just expensive ones. The majority tend to have a distinctly Disney feel, as though around the next cul-de-sac our little boat will sail past Olde Siam. There is an attempt at wholesale replication on the one hand, and a jarring failure in execution on the other. Neither is appealing; both together are horrifying. All art incorporates older elements, some art cross-cultural references; nothing man-made can ever be wholly new. That fact notwithstanding, history, geography, and culture along with form give a work its content, its meaning. The meaning of these tract homes is simply 'Tuscan sells.'

Why is that more troubling than an older neighborhood filled with bungalows or ranch-style homes? Are not all houses, since the dawn of modern real estate, designed to sell, to appeal to the buying public? And what's more, was not the Atomic Age as executed in the American home a perfectly articulated lifestyle, as detailed and complete as the 'Tuscan' variety, down to its Saturn-shaped lamps, spiky, Sputnik table legs, and galactic-design curtain fabrics?

Okay, yes, in theory, but in the case of the 1950s, few people kitted out their entire house in space-age furnishings, and there were plenty of other 1950s looks that mixed with the outright futuristic ones harmoniously. One could have an up-to-the-minute television lamp atop a table from 1947 with no grave sensation of aesthetic malaise nor expectation of scorn from the neighbors. Additionally, the house would not come with an actual satellite in the front yard, which is as good an equivalent as I can imagine for faux-cracked walls, faux-aged fake beams, faux-ruined paint jobs, and murals in the toilet of someplace you are not but which the entire house contrives to make you believe you are. And, yes, too, houses and minimalls and BP stations reflect the aesthetics of the time, but there is the additional problem that the aesthetics of earlier times demanded better craftsmanship and genuine materials. Moreover, people bought furniture differently decades ago, as companies realized they could sell more over time if they offered 'sets' that could be acquired slowly as finances allowed: even the counterparts of today's neo-Tuscans would not have bought a whole new household worth of thematically-congruent furniture, appliances, and accessories when they moved up in the world and bought a better house.

Lastly, 1950s style didn't seem thematic in the 1950s, because it wasn't thematic. It was simply up-to-date. Muddled, forced and fauxed tract-home half-iterations of a Tuscan fantasy lifestyle seem tragic to me because they hold out a series of promises they can never keep. The garish, kooky exuberance of Atomic Age decor cohabited in its enthusiasts' hearts with the very real fear of nuclear annihilation. Gratitude for the end of the War was balanced with the grim knowledge of how the War ended and what that could portend for future conflicts. Satellite table lamp and cars shaped like rockets were symbols not only of the power of technology, but of the hope that with proper stewardship it would lead humanity to more good than ill. It hurts my soul to contemplate the hopes these McMansions encapsulate.

Lesbian Flavored Yogurt: The Sixth Horsewymyn of the Apocalypse?

In Greece, when you go to a regular neighborhood market looking for yogurt, you choose between the texture/thickness of the yogurt, and the type of milk. Perhaps at a chain supermarket you can get some wacky sugary ones from Sweden with berries in them, but there is not a whole aisle devoted to 533 different varieties as there is here.

And I for one am sick of yogurt. I am sick of there being 533 kinds, I am sick of wanting the taste of yogurt and then being unable to find a yogurt-flavored yogurt, and I am sick of the ads with the poorly-substantiated claims for the yogurt that makes your bowel movements 'regular' and likewise for the other yogurts that make you lose weight.

But I am utterly at my wits' end with the ostensibly unending, years old series of ads for yogurt in which two vapid bints staged in various social situations attempt to one-up each other in tiresome encomia to their favorite bacteria-laden dessert brand. Throughout the years, after a first unwitting encounter with this ad, I have taken what precautions I can not to hear any version of it. However, like so many others, I am human, too, and I recently heard and saw what I imagine to be the newest incarnation.

Here the hideous duo are kitted up in over-the-top stereotypes of the Bad Bridesmaid's Dress. After looking this ad up in an attempt to find some of the actual dialogue (in lieu of watching Lifetime programming for days on end hoping for a chance to see a commercial I don't want to see), I learned that the African-American component of this unctuous couple is famous for being, and playing, a lesbian, and thus some of her lines can be read as in-jokes to those in the know.

I am neither in the know nor in the care because these ads are wretched and unwatchable. Extradiagetical biobits cannot redeem their inspidity. I would still know nothing after seeing one of them about what sets this particular yogurt apart from similar brands or styles except that a lesbian who plays a lesbian on television got paid to wear a puffy dress and say vapid things about it. I do not surround myself exclusively with lesbians, to be sure, and I have not attended an unusual amount of weddings, I confess, but my (admittedly limited) experience and keen intuition tell me that lesbians are no more likely than any other subset of wedding guests to sneak away from the festivities with a friend to eat yogurt.

I realize it is just an ad. I realize the point of the ad is to make me want to eat their yogurt, not to present an accurate 30-second snapshot of American suburban reality. And I further realize that 99.9 percent of all catered or preplated food little resembles, in taste, texture, or even color, the freshly-cooked dishes it vainly attempts to duplicate or evoke (take that, Herbfarm, you pretentious, hideously-decorated, lukewarm-food-serving, taco truck without wheels!).

I know all that. When I went to a music conference in BC for the arts council in my town I lived on Pellegrino, Diet Coke, minibar Jelly Bellys, vodka gimlets and sourdough rolls for four days, because the thing went on all day and all night and there was no way to leave the hotel. And whether it is a conference or a wedding or funeral, I would never eat my one-of-three-thousand tepid chicken breasts over stale brown rice with a day-old shallot-dill sauce. However, I would also not tuck two yogurt containers and spoons in my purse so that I could invite my best friend out to the veranda for curdled milk with high-fructose fruit compote while everyone else was drinking enough and having a sufficiently festive time dancing and congratulating the happy couple not to trouble themselves overmuch about the realities of catered food.

But let's say I were the sort of person destined to find the hidden pain in every experience. I know the food is going to be wretched, I know I'm going to be petulant, and I don't want to risk ruining yet another social occasion for my significant other. The hosted bar alone may not suffice; perhaps I'll get violently drunk like the last four times and tell the hosts just what I think of their elastic chicken breasts and scorched sauce.

No, this (ridiculous and entirely implausible scenario) calls for forethought. I eat a bit in advance and tuck a tiny treat into the handbag, perhaps. A treat, ladies and gentlemen, not a one-cup serving of nonfat bacterial cultures. Yogurt is not a treat. In this country it is punishment food for people who think they are fat.

The risible point of this and other equally cloying ads is that by adding loads of sugar and a portion of denatured fruit, the punishment food becomes a pallid - but good enough when you're starving yourself! - simulacrum of the sort of foods that always have a lot of sugar, as well as flavor, texture, and fat. The consumer buys the 'lemon meringue pie' yogurt because she has resolved to deny herself lemon meringue, and all other pies, cakes, tortes, and pastry, until she has lost a certain number of pounds. Not to put too fine a point on it, but for those of you who hadn't realized it up to this point, there is no transubstantiation involved. It's really still nonfat sugared yogurt - and it's really still crap.

Nonetheless, here are some of the sighingly orgasmic, fatuous (mmmm, and - hamfistedly ironic! Get it: not catch the bouquet? I'm a lesbian!!!) sighs of the two bridesmaids as they curb their hunger and sartorial angst with spoonfuls of Lactobacillus and Streptococcus:


"This yogurt is not-catching-the-bridal-bouquet good."
"It's burning this ugly bridesmaid dress good."
"It's getting out of these uncomfortable shoes good."


I'm in too much pain to delve into why one of them should be so disturbed by being paired with an usher shorter than she is; clearly the job description must be a more, em, encompassing one that in the past if physical compatibility is such a large part.

How Stupid Are We, Really?

Or is it lazy? Please see Michael Bywater's excellent _Big Babies, or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?_ for a sobering exegesis on media and government infantilization of We the People. For a less-well-written rant, however, I offer up my enduring nausea at a long-running commercial for an osteoporosis medication, starring the presumably brittle-boned Sally Field.

This advertisement haunts me when I see people dawdling in the fruit section of the supermarket, when I zip past cars barely going the speed limit, and each and every time I approach getting more than six hours of sleep. Why? Not because of its insipidity and absurd premise, but because, as Ms. Fields makes clear in her first-person my-story closeup, we are very, very busy people these days, and it wasn't until she had a sit-down with a 'girlfriend' about time-management and its relation to this enfeebling condition that this woman was able to reclaim those seven seconds per day (calculation mine and approximate) she had previously needed to devote not only to ingesting a pill, but to swallowing the liquid necessary to washing it down.

As Field laments, her 'girlfriend,' like so many others, had to 'set aside time' every day (stress hers, not mine) to engage in this laborious - and manifestly wasteful - activity. Now, with this new monthly medication, her lucky friend can use those spare two hundred or so seconds she accrued for other activities, for which, one hopes, she does not have to 'set aside time.' Perhaps drinking a whole glass of liquid. Perhaps bemoaning (briefly) her misspent youth. Perhaps rubbing in a skin cream on one-half of her face, or filing one nail, or ironing one cuff.

How stupid? I don't know. I can't imagine anyone for whom this ad would make sense. Of course anyone would rather take a pill once a month over once a day, and once a day over seven times a day -- but 'set aside time?' The imagination is beggared to imagine that taking a pill cannot reasonably, in most people's thinking, be combined with, for example, spontaneous, or at least natural and necessary, consumption of liquid. One could even be reading, or on the telephone, or contemplating one's misspent youth -- and neither the taking of the pill, nor the swallowing of the liquid, would interrupt any of these.

Unless I am wrong.