5 February 12020 is Constitution Day in Mexico. In Burundi
it is Unity Day, in Finland it is Runeberg’s Birthday, and in Pakistan Kashmir Solidarity Day. It is also Lord
Haden-Guest’s birthday. Lord Haden-Guest is better known in America—and certainly
to me—as Christopher Guest, the brilliant actor, director, writer and satirist
responsible for such public atrocities as Flash Bazbo, Space Explorer; Ron
Fields, promoter extraordinaire; Nigel Tufnel, Spinal Tap guitarist; Bob Dylan
and James Taylor in Lemmings. I first
became aware of Christopher Guest when I listened to a friend’s copy of the Lemmings soundtrack album not long after
it came out, and I thought I recognized his voice on the National Lampoon Radio Hour in 1973 and 1974. He was the stand-out
performer on Good-bye Pop in 1976,
and just seemed to keep going and going, like a certain advertising bunny.
What with America having lost the respect of virtually
everybody in the world, with its new Middle East Peace Plan derided and
rejected by all the players that count (even the European Union has given it
the thumbs down), with North Korea and Iran openly flaunting their nuclear
programs at the expense of the United States, you might think the American
President would have a hard time coming up with foreign policy bright spots for
his current State of the Union speech. You would be wrong, however; the Chief
Flake simply lied about the situation. Problem solved—as long as nobody expects
you to come up with, you know, actual
solutions.
In the meantime the opposition party—the Democrats (full
disclosure: I am a registered Republican) have got off to an appallingly
atrocious start with the debacle of the Iowa caucuses. What with delayed
results, low turnout, the anointed successor to the Great Obama dropping into
the toilet, bigots who voted for Mayor Pete demanding their ballots returned to
them on discovering that he was gay (how in hell could anyone have overlooked
it?), and skewed delegate counts, the opening seems more like a farce than a
serious campaign. So now we’ve got a Jew, a gay guy, a woman, and as Archie
Bunker would put it, a reglar American in competition for the presidential
sweepstakes. It sounds more like the potential cast for a remake of Gilligan’s Island. Which of them will
survive?
On this day in history in 1974 a handful of political misfits
calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped a granddaughter of
William Randolph Hearst in an attempt (spectacularly unsuccessful) to free some
of their members who were in prison for a political murder or something equally
inane. I personally heard the news on the radio while writing a sequence in a
satirical novel in which William Randolph Hearst ordered the kidnapping of one
of my main characters to force him to join a revolutionary group working for
the overthrow of President William Jennings Bryan, so the event kind of
resonated with me in an odd manner. Hearst’s granddaughter had a bad time of
it, was forced to take part in the group’s activities, and ended up going to
prison, but at least she survived.
On the personal front, that hideous cough is back, at least as
bad as before, so I’m becoming pessimistic about the possibilities of ever
getting over it. I still have hopes, but they’re getting fainter. We’ll just
have to see, I guess.
