THE HUTCH: Well, I do. That's why I was gonna make you promise me that you won't turn the TV off at halftime.
RUSH: I would never turn the Super Bowl off at halftime no matter what's happening....
THE HUTCH: ... But if you will notice, why do most advertisers want to advertise on the first half?
RUSH: Well, Hutch, it's because the women stop watching at halftime.
THE HUTCH: (laughing) No. Because they know, man, that the Super Bowl has a tendency to be one-sided. We've had some great Super Bowls in the last....
RUSH: Yeah, but it hasn't been the case in the last five or six years. This game has gone down to the last play...
THE HUTCH: But there is a possibility that someone could be put to shame this week. I'm not gonna push, but I believe my Green Bay Packers are gonna come through....
So, Packers win in a blowout, right? Anyway, you see the subject of women came up. It comes up again at the end of the discussion:
RUSH: Hutch, neither the Steelers nor the Packers have cheerleaders. This is gonna be the first Super Bowl in history, I think, without cheerleaders....
THE HUTCH: The whole aspect of chickification of the game, I'm proud that finally they did something to keep women off the field....
RUSH: Tell me how the game's being chickified. I've got one minute.
THE HUTCH: Okay. Look at all of the new rules. Everything that keeps you from being boys (laughing) they're making you get penalties for. You can't celebrate, and if you do, you gotta do it alone. Helmet to helmet. You can't have two vicious of a hook. That's the game of football, and they're totally feminizing the game, and we're getting a little tired of it.
RUSH: You think there's gonna be --
THE HUTCH: Besides, there is a lot more prostate cancer in the world than breast cancer, bro.
RUSH: I hear you, pal.
THE HUTCH: Let's put some black out there on the field and take care of the guys.
Did you remember that she graduated from law school? She was one of the new sort of political wives, who had independent career aspirations yet choose to move into a man's shadow.
She did not mention Mr. Edwards in her message on Monday.
“There are certainly times when we aren’t able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It’s called being human,” Mrs. Edwards wrote. “But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful.”
She did not apologize to us for participating in the deceit perpetrated by John Edwards, which skewed the 2008 Democratic primaries.
I have been doing this all my life as an adult. And I still survive as a language-user – speaking, listening, reading, writing – over the past two years. Or, rather, I survive in fluctuating ways....
I'm no longer fluent. I've forgotten how to do it. I can't do it automatically. I can't hear whether a word that I say has come out right or not. It's as if it's not me that's speaking, but some kind of inefficient proxy forming the words. It's like there is a time-delay between speaking and hearing your own words, or if you were speaking a language whose phonetics and semantics you don't properly know. And when I speak or write, the words do sometimes come out wrong, slightly nonsensically.
Ah! The decline! But it is not the saddest decline — this painless fade-out. If this happened to me, I believe — I hope — I would write my way through to the end, like this. Would you not embrace the end of life as a writer and crumple, visibly, into the diminishment of your powers?
You can buy the book — "Half Empty" — here. I highly recommend the audio version. His reading style is very funny — and also easy to sleep to (which is 2/3 of the reason why I buy audiobooks).
I discovered that book after watching David Sedaris on "The Daily Show" and going off to buy "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk" — which you can buy here. Again, the audiobook is highly recommended — but "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk" isn't easy to sleep to because it's tricked up with a lot of music... and also actors read some of the stories and actors try so hard. It's wakefulness-provoking.
So Christopher Hitchens is expatiating in Slate about the dearth of decent political candidates in U.S. elections. He talks about talking to his "hosts in Connecticut" and his friends in Washington D.C., where he's lived for 3 decades. And he casts his eyes about to the states of New York and California. Having thus surveyed the American landscape, he opines that the "enthusiastic and intelligent people" are no longer "willing to give up potentially more lucrative careers" because of the risk to "their career and their family life" and "the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college." You just can't get "normal" people to run for office anymore.
What about Ron Johnson? Here's Politico, presenting the GOP Senate candidate in Wisconsin as emblematic of the new sort of politician who has emerged from the Tea Party movement:
Until last fall, Ron Johnson was just an intensely private guy with a good business and a nice house on Lake Winnebago. He kept a stack of Wall Street Journals next to his bed, folded just right so he wouldn't forget to read columnist Dan Henninger on this or Paul Gigot on that. A trim, silver-haired businessman, he was rich but unknown, even in this, his hometown, despite big donations to Lourdes High School and his thriving plastics company here.
Running for office never crossed his mind...
The Tea Party of Oshkosh was pulling together a rally for a fall event, featuring Joe the Plumber, the working man who emerged as a folk hero to small government conservatives in 2008. They needed a businessman to talk about what they saw as the scary, Big Brother approach to ObamaCare - and Johnson was happy to oblige. His daughter Carrie was born with a heart defect and saved by two doctors - a story anyone following this campaign has heard many times in ads and speeches ever since. So, he let loose with an attack on the demonization of doctors and, more broadly, the mortal threat to American exceptionalism.
The new law “will destroy our health care system,” Johnson said in an interview. “I am totally convinced of that.”
In hindsight, Johnson, in that speech, was capturing a major mood change in American politics that swept up not only business owners but also anti-government conservatives and skeptical independents. These groups, by late summer of 2009, had turned against the president and his party – and never returned.
Read the whole thing. You too, Mr. Hitchens.
Oh, it's not as if Hitchens didn't think of the Tea Party. After telling us about his elite circle of people who are so smart and informed but disinclined to enter the political fray, he does acknowledge that there is much more going on these days: his observation "may seem to discount or ignore the apparent flood of new political volunteers who go to make up the Tea Party movement." You can see the gears turning in his brain as he tries to get to the end of this article that began so easily, built on what looks to me like dinner-table conversations with his friends. How to dismiss these pesky teafolk of the flyover realms? Ah! He proclaims:
They come from a long and frankly somewhat boring tradition of anti-incumbency and anti-Washington rhetoric, and they are rather an insult to anyone with anything of a political memory.
They are an insult. These people aren't worth talking to or about. Why, they aren't even people at all. They are an insult.
Since when is it truly insurgent to rail against the state of affairs in the nation's capital? How long did it take Gingrich's "rebel" forces in the mid-1990s to become soft-bottomed incumbents in their turn?
Questions. Questions. Speaking of untoned asses, shouldn't you have to get off yours and go out and talk to Americans in places like Wisconsin? One answer is that Hitchens is gravely ill, but he's still pouring out political commentary, and he's not asking for pity or showing any. He's as imperious as ever, and the respect he deserves for that bravery and effort ought to come in the form of serious engagement with his actual words he is... spewing.
If Benjamin was right about Art Nouveau in general, then Jean Carriès was a dissenter from the movement who refused to play along with the lie. Carriès did not carry the prettifying gene. He had an eye for the monstrous, for the contortions of nature and its abnormalities. If Carriès accepted the idea that the modern city is an extension of the natural world, he did so with the proviso that the extension was a malignant tumor.
There are death panels. They don't want to be seen as death panels, because to be seen as death panels will undermine their relentless, bureaucratic work. So see them.
Hitch is dying as he lives, with integrity and passion. And since we all die in the end, alone, it is an impertinence even to enter this zone of another's last things. But for me, the human being, for good and ill, is more than reason. Reason must govern us, but it cannot explain us.
We live alone in a universe so vaster than we are and with an expiration date that defies our own attempts to understand it. We are wired to fear death and suffering, and in the spiritual transcendence of death and suffering we exercise our greatest humanity. The moments I have felt closest to God have been when I have been stripped of every security, the moments when I have felt no human love, known no safe home, witnessed unspeakable cruelty - and was rescued by nothing but His ineffable, boundless and yet intimate caritas.
This is not an argument, I know. It can easily be dismissed as wish fulfilment. All I can say is: this is not how I experienced these moments. They were real. In suffering I have felt and known God reach into my life and grab me by the scruff of my neck and shake me with the brusque affection of a father's compassion.
I know Christopher feels none of this, has never felt any of this, which puzzles but does not vex me. Friendship, in the end, is about the lack of any desire to change another person.
It is about loving him as he is. And in that love there is the only human redemption and, in my view, the true intimation of the divine.
IN THE COMMENTS: Irene said (after I said "Picture someone who wants that drug to live. It isn't funded. FDA approved, but you can't get it under Medicare. We don't have to go by their euphemisms. Why isn't "Death Panel" an appropriate statement and an important way to create alarm?"):
If Avastin is what stands between you and death, then yes, "Death Panel" is an "appropriate statement" and yes, it is appropriate to cause alarm.
Full disclosure. I have advanced ovarian cancer. Hello friends and relatives.
The statistics for my stage of ovarian cancer (Stage IIIc) project an 18% survival rate two years after diagnosis.
I took part in a clinical trial for Avastin. My provider recently revealed to me that I received the test drug.
I am approaching that two-year mark of initial diagnosis, and so far, I am doing well. I attribute that good result to Avastin, which prevents the regeneration of cancer cells. Yeah, I had some lousy side effects, but it seems to have worked.
Thank you, and good night, Irene.
UPDATE: The Washington Post has a long article about this controversy over Avastin.
The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the recommendation of influential scientific advisers to revoke authorization of the drug to treat metastatic breast cancer. Contrary to initial research, new studies indicate that the benefits of the drug, which costs $8,000 a month, do not outweigh its risks, the advisory panel concluded.
Citing a dearth of evidence of the drug's effectiveness, its potential toxic side effects, and its high cost, many cancer experts, patient advocates and others are welcoming the prospect that Avastin's authorization for breast cancer might be repealed. But the possibility is alarming other cancer specialists, women taking the drug, some members of Congress and advocates for giving patients as much access to as many treatments as possible.
The FDA is not supposed to consider costs in its decisions, but if the agency rescinds approval, insurers are likely to stop paying for treatment.
"It's hard to talk about Avastin without talking about costs," said Eric P. Winer, director of the Breast Oncology Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. "For better or worse, Avastin has become in many ways the poster child of high-priced anti-cancer drugs."
In the cost-benefit analysis, your improved chance of living may not be worth $8,000 a month.
Christopher Hitchens has, it seems, decided to perform the drama of dying of cancer on camera, being interviewed by whatever media people are willing to step up and ask him how does it feel...
I would not cancel these appearances or let down my friends or miss the chance of selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.
In "the land of malady," where he now finds himself...
Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work.... [T]here seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited.....
He wonders whether the famous Kübler-Ross stages of dying are appropriate for him, given the way he's lived:
... I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.
To Hitch, "Why me?" is a "dumb question." "Why not?" — he quips.
CORRECTION: The appearance on "The Daily Show" occurred after he woke up feeling as if he were shackled to his own corpse. I read the phrase "The night of the terrible morning...." as meaning the eve of the terrible morning.
A gruelling course of chemotherapy caused his weight to plummet to just two stone. So when five-year-old cancer patient Lewis Mighty put on a few pounds, his mother was overjoyed. Until, that is, she received a letter from the NHS bluntly telling her that Lewis was overweight.
With astonishing insensitivity, it warned her that he was at risk of cancer - despite being just two pounds over his recommended weight. The letter suggested Lewis should take up swimming, even though an intravenous drip in his chest to deliver life-saving drugs prevents him from being in water.
[S]tyle encompasses far more than good looks. In fact, it trumps beauty because it's rooted in deep cultural knowledge and self-confidence. Style is an expression of choices -- a declaration of individuality. And thus, the lack of it is not a matter of poor genetic luck. It is, a particularly judgmental soul could argue, your fault....
[I]t can make others feel terribly old-fashioned and parochial by comparison.... Women -- and men -- use style as a tool of intimidation, self-promotion and belittlement all the time. U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina's off-topic remark about Sen. Barbara Boxer's hair caused quite the explosion when it was captured by a live microphone. Fiorina quipped that Boxer's hair was "so yesterday." Fiorina has said she was quoting a friend, but her tone oozed delight in the observation as she happily repeated it...
Fiorina's words weren't, by any means, vulgar or angry. Indeed, she had the cutting tone of a gossipy girlfriend who knows a thing or two about hair travails. But as she gently fingered her own chic pixie, while relaying an insulting description of Boxer's hair, the polite smile never faded from her face -- until she realized her microphone was on. She bore all the earmarks of a style bully.
Givhan concludes that Fiorina was making an indirect but effective political argument that Boxer is out of step with the times. But let's take a closer look at what was really going on. Rewatch the short clip and think about whether what we are really seeing is a woman "ooz[ing] delight" because she thought her hair was "chic" — a "chic pixie" — and the other woman's hair really was so much worse. Does Fiorina even agree with the friend she quotes? Watch carefully, and keep in mind that Carly Fiorina was only quite recently bald (as a consequence of cancer treatment):
It's a bit hard to tell unless you look for it, but I'm looking after hearing a friend, a cancer survivor who lost her own hair, insist that what we are seeing is a cancer survivor's humorous attitude about hair. I now think that Fiorina stopped in the middle of an anecdote when someone off camera signaled for her to shut up, but that if she had gone on, she would have made a self-effacing/sarcastic wisecrack about her own hair along the lines of: Oh, yes, because my hair is so today, if by "today," you mean not utterly bald.
The gesture she makes at her own hair, just before she clams up, is not, I think, a mean girl's I'm-so-gorgeous primp. It's comic business that would have fit amusingly with the wisecrack that was never cracked. My friend, a woman who, like Fiorina, has recently regrown hair, feels sure she has the ability to recognize a shared dark humor about hair that women who have not gone through the experience don't pick up on. Hair is a big deal to women, and our ears perk up when we hear talk about other women's hair. Givhan explores that with good sensibility, but I think she, like many others, is judging Fiorina without a full understanding of the context.
On the other hand, Fiorina's private psychodrama is a bit beside the point when she's running for the Senate. She's got to get these things right and not give her opponents material to use against her. In that light, it doesn't matter what the explanation is, because she's running for office, and she needs to do that competently.
