John Wayne, Turkey Day, Snow

John Wayne, Thanksgiving, and snow. Three things that came from the darkside.

Not that the new Democratic sovereigns are about to do anything about it (or even care about my distress), but this country would be so much better if we got rid of winter wonderlands, the Duke, and Turkey Day. If there is a hell, and if I am going there, the doors to the elevator will open on a blizzardy Thanksgiving as Wayne stands at the end of a long plank-table in one of those cartoon cowboy outfits carving a giant pimento – that nasty big fruit which comes with green olives and looks like the unsheathed part of a dog’s penis (a veggy phobia for another blog). The only thing that might make hell worse is if I were a pregnant character on an E.R. episode.

Okay, so this is what I would say to Congress:

His real name was Marion Michael Morrison; he failed the entry test to Annapolis, never served in a branch of the military service, only survived one semester as a football player at USC before throwing out his shoulder, and didn’t perform a single stunt. There are numerous stories of how the Duklette and John Ford got together – most of them involving some form of footballer manliness, and all of them false; Wayne was a prop man, Ford need a B-grade actor for his vision of a chauvinistic, bigoted, simple-minded, gratuitously violent American frontier.

Morrison is reputed to have been a cultural elitist, and, as evidenced by even a cursory look at his cursory imdb bio, a rabid nationalist – did you know he helped found something called the “Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals”? Have you ever seen “The Alamo” or “The Green Berets”? This is white-washed American mythology at its superficial, simplistic worst. The Dukinator would have been a happy German commandant in the 1930s.

Did you know there is not a single Morrison film without an act of violence in it? Did you know his childhood dog was named “Duke” and that’s where the nickname came from? One wonders what would have happened if Morrison had lived long enough to view “Brokeback Mountain.”

The first image of Morrison as “The Ringo Kid” in “Stagecoach” (the Dukedick’s breakthrough) has him in a medium-shot dead-center of the frame, from the top of the frame down, in squeaky clean cowboy duds that look like he just arrived for a costume party, and of the same color palate as the desert itself. And this is Morrison in his element – he fills the world, actually appearing to be part of the landscape itself, an element, something to be reckoned with. He can do no wrong, and his violence is always righteous. He represents the dark side of American patriotism, the sociopathic belief that might makes right as long as it comes in a big white package.

Does George W. wear Marion Morrison underwear so that the Duke rides the little Bush around the halls of state?

So, how about that other great American institution, TURKEY DAY! Jeezus. Just say it out loud, “Turkey Day.” Can anything sound more insipid? And it’s usually uttered in tones of jubilant glee – “Happy Turkey Day!” Okay, okay, many find its gluttony appealing after an entire year of deprivation (I mean, with gas prices and all, it’s almost like Darfur around here) and I personally have no trouble with calorie orgies (hey, we are the lucky few) but it’s the forced interaction, the tension, the compulsion to be merry that infests the entire holidaze. If you are pissed at friends and family the other 364 days a year, a giant dead dinosaur in the middle of the table won’t fix your bed-wetting psychosis.

I suppose we should celebrate at least one example of a time when all the New England honkies got along well with the indigenous folk.

Which leads, naturally, to Mother Nature’s own celebration of hell: snow.

Who’s to blame? Well, I don’t want to piss off the Big Guy (you suppose God is a fan of John Wayne?) but snow is clearly a manifestation of humanity’s fallen state. In fact, one could say that snow is God’s way of trying to kill us.

‘Round here Hoosiers say, “Well, if it’s going to be cold, at least it should be pretty.” What the fuck is pretty about piles of gritty slush at busstops, sliding through red lights into sudden death, and falling on your ass so hard your head rebounds like a tennis ball off the sidewalk? You can always tell where someone has peed when it snows.

The origin of this pathology is clearly my status as a displaced Oregonian. In Oregon, when it snows, we wreck our cars, freeze spread-eagle to sidewalks, skid to our asses at busstops, and generally fill the local evening news with pathetic and painful blooper reels. Even tow truck drivers and cops wreck their vehicles and are traumatized for life.

Anyway, enough pain for one evening.

God bless America, it just needs some fixing.

Hotel Hell

Philadelphia, downtown. December. An army of nerds descends upon the city.

The Marriott and its associated bunkhouses buzz like massive corporate hives of gastro-intestinal distress and emotional overload (masquerading as hipster dufus wit around the lobby bar). Imagine: a legion of English graduate students with their panties in a bunch over the do-or-die paranoia which precedes the publish-or-perish desperation. It is as if the quadrant of blocks surrounding the hotel has become a giant sounding-board for dork horror and kung-fu erudition. And in the midst of this subdued bedlam, a liter of Diet Coke from a vending machine costs two dollars! Noon-to-noon internet costs ten dollars! And this is on top of a hundred and fifty friggin’ dollars per night for a squishy bed, a shower, lousy cable TV, and suckling at the tit of the Pay-per-view god.

Besides the shivering, under-paid doorman, the main difference between the Philadelphia Marriott and a Motel 6 is the lobby, which in the Marriott gleams like a giant upside-down bathtub and is decorated like a wedding cake or a set out of Logan’s Run; I half-expect fairies and water-sprites to flit about the ceiling. And, lest we forget, at the moment we are discussing, this cavernous glittering modern marvel reverberates with stressed out dweebs in a rage to prove their savage intellectualism. It is pretty, pretty, pretty, but you can’t sleep there. And yet: Parking your car for three days costs over a hundred dollars, and I’m amazed we weren’t charged for riding the elevator or using the can.

But who is to blame for this orgy of inflation? We are. Americans. The freedom to spend inherent in a democratic, capitalistic, technocratic society. The men in the monkey-suits will always win as long as we are willing to pay over a hundred dollars to sleep in a bed changed nightly by under-educated, under-paid, exhausted, overtly-resentful people. The yuppies in their beemers and Porsche 9-11s can sit their lean sports-club asses in seat-warmer comfort as they whoosh down the corporate superhighways of night for the duration of the reign of the ruling un-elite: the educated proles in their rage to rise.

Of course…it was nice to wake up someplace that was clean…and capitalism has the advantage of a Starbucks in the lobby one short elevator ride away…and the lobby was awfully nice…