Surfeited with Dainties - Michael Brendan Dougherty

Entries from February 1, 2007 - March 1, 2007

What D.C. Does to an American

is there a traitor inside me?I know I should get back to regular blogging. I was thinking just that when I tried to go to sleep last night. It was an uneasy night. Some ancient nightmare ran through my bones and rattled my guts. I saw feverish, ugly things happening in D.C.: ghosts heckling men in suits, think tanks erupting in purple flames, my friends calling out my name but I couldn't help them. Awful things. Then a light grew in the middle of it, blotting out that vision and and a child's voice said "Get out!" My alarm clock woke me and I found a paper, slightly torn, and on the edges, wet. It had my handwriting on it, but not my current handwriting. More like the script the nuns taught my class in Sacred Heart in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Yes, in red ink in my childhood imitation of the Palmer method was this:

I want to drink cold sarsaparilla from a glass bottle and cheer my favorite third baseman. I want to read Edith Wharton’s jazz-age novels, and dance salsa at Cuba Libre in the city of brotherly love. I want to pretend I can see the rock shores of the Aran islands from a small beach town in New Jersey then eat a grotesquely large slice of pizza and throw a frisbee underneath the next day’s sunrise. On Friday I want to escape from this imperial city, from the bureaucrats and bloodless public philosophers, the empire-builders, the card-issuers and policy geeks, and I want to drive the backroads south and west all night and try on cowboy hats at truck stops, and dance with a pretty girl - on the edge of a wheat field under the Tennessee starlights, (she follows my lead by standing on my shoes)– to get drunk and yell my throat sore at the moon, then make it back in time for work on Monday. I want to shuck this business casual wardrobe, get in the ring and take a frozen jab to my eye– and remind myself that if Norman Mailer could box on Friday nights into his sixties I can sure as hell sock this brute in his ugly WASP chin. I want to laugh with the guys from my neighborhood as we walk the Brooklyn bridge. I want to drink sangrias and flirt over a table on the sidewalks of the East Village, and hear a country singer coo a song of heartbreak then kick over the mic stand in a low lit club on the Upper West Side. I want a sweet girl to use my grandmother’s recipe for blueberry muffins on a Sunday afternoon. I want to silently thank God for all that is good and then pull her to the couch. I want her to be close, to shake and sputter and I want the breath in her laughter on my neck.

It is probably a sign. I need to pay my taxes and turn this paper and myself over to Homeland Security for screening.

Posted on 2/23/2007 11:13 AM by

Michael Brendan Dougherty in Personal Essays |

4 Comments |

An Imaginative Landscape

Winning the WestOccasionally I've said a word or two about the importance of what Americans believe about themselves and their country, the myths that simultaneously create the national character and inform our experience. What do these myths tells us about ourselves? What do they demand of us today? Are the demands of older American mythologies in conflict with newer ones? Speaking to that is a fascinating article in Policy Review about "The West" in the American story, by Cheryl Miller.

Roosevelt, Wister, and Parkman believed that the frontier spirit had checked democracy’s dangerous tendencies. Now that the actual West could no longer serve that function, the idea of the West had to do so instead. So they sought to create a national myth that would shore up the American character against the debilitating effects of the new commercial age. As Smith argued in Virgin Land, it was not the actual experiences of Western pioneers that formed the American character, but rather an elite living in the East that self-consciously crafted the Western story for national purposes. Indeed, with help from Buffalo Bill, it turns out that a fairly small number of intellectual entrepreneurs managed in the space of about a quarter century to transform the West from a physical landscape into an imaginative one. The new, imagined West carried the same values through literature, histories, and popular culture. Vehicles for the new myth included Roosevelt’s own history, The Winning of the West, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, the penny pamphlets chronicling the adventures of the great wilderness men Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and, later, the dime-store sagas of Deadwood Dick and Calamity Jane. But by far the most influential work of Western mythology was Owen Wister’s The Virginian. - Cheryl Miller

Read the entire piece.

Posted on 2/15/2007 09:26 PM by

Michael Brendan Dougherty in Culture |

3 Comments |

More Steak Dinners for Al Gore and Me.

WIth all the fixinsRoss Douthat makes a compelling case that VP candidates who go down to defeat are near-locks to go down to defeat in the future. But he messed up - and I may get a steak dinner out of it. Laying out what we both take to be the improbable scenario where Edwards beats Hillary and Obama, Ross declares:

...I'd bet a steak dinner that a certain former Vice-President will use the opening to jump into the race with both feet - because if the Democratic front-runner is a one-term Senator with zero foreign-policy experience, then the nomination will be Al Gore's for the taking, and I doubt that he'll be able to resist. - Ross Douthat

I accept the bet.

I agree that the nomination would be Al Gore's for the taking. If Gore "Pulled a Nixon" (which is how this should be described) while Hillary was still the presumed front-runner, we'd all love the drama/tedium of it all. But if Edwards does the improbable (which is the condition under which this bet becomes live), Gore will not enter this race. If Gore were entering this race, or even thinking of entering this race, he'd be dropping weight fast. I'm willing to bet this steak dinner on the premise that because he hasn't signed up for Furey's Combat abs yet - he's not about to do it again. If he looks like this in five months, I'm done in. Right now, he still looks more like this.

Go Edwards! Erm, oh no.

Posted on 2/6/2007 08:42 AM by

Michael Brendan Dougherty in Politics |

3 Comments |