As some of us (OK, me) were saying on the Second Sunday Zoom call with paying subscribers, this year’s 9/11 anniversary commemorations just hit a bit different, surprisingly so. Could have been residual shock over the murder of Fifdom’s beloved Andrew Wimsatt, could have been a lingering suspicion that the profound shittiness of our contemporary politics is downwind from those awful explosions, or maybe it’s the numerological magic of silver anniversaries.
Whatever the source, there’s a lot more snarl this year, which brings me to the late Tom Petty. As mentioned on Episode #574, I had a distinct memory of our laconic Florida Man of Song delivering a days-after fundraising-telethon version of “I Won’t Back Down” that appeared as if he hadn’t slept since the attacks & was ready to choke out Osama bin Laden on stage. Moynihan corrected me that it came in October, but no, that was the Paul McCartney-organized Concert for New York City of Oct. 20; Petty was part of the Sept. 21 A Tribute to Heroes. The more important point being, my memory of the performance was totally correct:
* Last Monday, or about a thousand years ago, I sat in the hosting chair for The Reason Roundtable, talking about 9/11, but also the collapse of government-run K-12, Che-D Vance’s proposal to subsidize stay-at-home mothering, and whether failures on RFK-jay’s watch mean that the FDA is important after all:
* Bill Maher was in a grumpy mood on the 25th anniversary, and many (fine) people (on both sides) are here for it:
* It’s funny; Maher mentioned there, with appropriate good humor, how Politically Incorrect was cancelled because of his post-9/11 statements about the hijackers not being “cowards.” As it happens, when I was forcing myself to read my not-infrequently cringeworthy post-9/11 output, both professionally and on my (*wretches*) warblog, I came across my second-ever published piece for Reason, headlined “Censorship Gravy Train,” that took a scornful view of Maher, his defenders, and anyone claiming that there was a significant post-9/11 crackdown on dissent. I think I was right (if maybe too flip) about the ridiculousness of pre-emptive free speech martyrdom, but the column also vibrates with a certain chip-on-shoulder professional envy that advertises some of the obscurity I whined like a cur about in my self-published Aug. 22, 2021 rant (also referenced on #574), “Astonishingly Bad Career Management.”
I am not proud of these pieces, at all, but include them to encourage those many of you have written us over the years, asking about stalled-out writing aspirations, rude professional setbacks, or even mid-career shifts into journalism and media. I won’t tell you that it gets better, but that it can get better. After all, as I snuck into the very lede of that Reason piece,
After September 11, editors who had spiked exactly zero of my previous 152 columns and articles about politics and the media suddenly refused to publish five out of 11 about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath.
Yeah, I fucking counted. But I also didn’t lose my sense of proportion. Some doors close, new ones open (Reason, the National Post, Tech Central Station, which I had forgotten about until this moment). In a way that might sound weird to 99% of you, especially knowing me now, those unfathomably rough weeks after Sept. 11 is when I chose, at long bloody last, to be the type of American who lives in and tries to have at least some tiny influence on America. You can sort of see that happening in real time, over the course of three days in the spring of 2002, when I A) went see the Angels on Opening Day (of what would be their championship season!), and then B) learned about the 9/11 murder of my childhood neighbor, Chris Newton.
* Kmele & the Tanglers also took on 9/11 this week:
* Those of you are not paying subscribers missed out on some of the excellent, informed conversation in Members Only #343 with New York Times DoJ reporter Devlin Barrett about his valuable new book, The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice. Fortunately, you can watch this clip about how Stephen Miller has assumed a historically unprecedented role in steering the federal government’s law enforcement apparatus:
* The Moynihan Report this past week made it a solid 3-for-3 in reboot awesomeness by landing Penelope Spheeris, director of the stop-what-you’re-doing-and-go-watch Decline in Western Civilization series. “[W]e talk about the lost movie she made with a cocaine-addled Richard Pryor; how she ended up directing big Hollywood films like Wayne’s World and Black Sheep; her...errrrr...unvarnished feelings about Tina Fey, Brittney Spears and Jennifer Aniston; and how the ratbag Weinstein brothers precipitated her retreat from Hollywood.”
* In last week’s Firehose, as dutifully flagged by Busty Wimsatt, I neglected to include two clips of Kmele on CNN that Andrew had posted to the Paloma Media page. Here they are, beginning with Sept. 3:
Then Sept. 5:
* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!
Before SNL, before Kentucky Fried Movie, there was The Groove Tube, a 1974 spoof on TV news, commercials, sitcoms, and culture writ large that I was shocked to learn that the hosts of your favorite media-criticism-kinda podcast have not seen. It’s 10 pounds of sketch comedy & set pieces in a 5-pound bag, replete with gratuitous nudity, Richard Belzer in blackface, and Chevy Chase. It’s not all gold, but worth sifting through for the TV news segment with reporting from the front lines of Suk Muk Dik, Koko the Clown reading erotica for the kids at home, a ‘70s cop show from the POV of the drug dealers, and Director Ken Shapiro dancing through the streets of Manhattan performing “Just You, Just Me” to the befuddlement of New Yorkers, maybe one of the most joyful scenes ever put to film. Rent on Amazon Prime, buy the Blu-Ray; here’s the trailer:
* Comment of the Week goes to Andrew Wimsatt:
This latest Firehose reminds me of what Kmele said In FC Episode 193. Here’s the transcript:
“And it’s hard for me to believe that the progress of the South, broadly speaking today, is not stunted, stultified, by the egregious crime of slavery, and the subsequent energies that were expended brutalizing black people and systematically discriminating against them. Everyone in the South is a victim of slavery, everyone, black, white, and otherwise, all of them. The culture is perhaps tainted by it in some insidious way that is somehow not known. The ones who are perhaps the worst, most victimized by it are probably like white people who still harbor all kinds of bizarre racial resentment they’ve been taught and been passed down generation to generation, and it is explicit, and it holds them back and makes them unable to operate in polite society. They’re victims of systematic racism to the extent that it’s a thing. And quite frankly the entirety of the United States’ history, I imagine, if it never had slavery, the entire country would be more prosperous, and it’s certainly true that the South would be more prosperous. I think of all of the brilliant Africans who were imported to this country by force and pressed into service, and their progeny, which must have included a couple of Einsteins, that were effectively never allowed to achieve anything. They were robbed of opportunity. They lost, and yes, their progeny perhaps led a less wonderful life because of it, but it’s hard to say, But it’s certainly true that all of us lost, and that sensibility is part of why I feel like,you know, the Juneteenths - I wish that was something that we could celebrate together universally, because both overcoming slavery and recognizing the awfulness of slavery, like the injury is all of ours, It is collective, it belongs to the country, and in the same respect the victory belongs to all of us as well, and I don’t think it’s a mistake to call it a victory. And I’ll talk about the obscenity of reparations another day, but I said enough.”
(Audio clip here:
Sendoff could be no other:
Petty stares right into the camera and you can tell he's thinking, you have no idea the hellfire that is about to rain down on you, you terrorist bastards, and I'm going to celebrate every second of it.
Groove Tube is a wild one. Turned me into a big Curtis Mayfield fan as a kid. And the Koko skit remains genius.