Concupiscent Bootlicking Sycophants: The Column That Will Not Be

Howdy all,

I regret to inform my 3 loyal fans that due to my column being eaten by TWO different computers TWICE, it will alas not appear tomorrow. ALl I have left is the beginning of a draft I saved before Earthlink decided to eat the final, 5-times-as-long version. I make it available below. You all are welcome to write your own ending, sicne the one I had planned has gone to be with the WMDs and Osama Bin Laden in the Land Of Things That Will Never Be Found.

Alas,

The Plaid Adder
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Concupiscent Bootlicking Sycophants
by The Plaid Adder

No, that's not one of those dadaist spam headers that have been making the rounds lately. It's my new acronym for CBS.

The drag about doing this column on Wednesdays is that it has to be in the can before the Tuesday night news. This means that right now, you will all be in a tizzy about the primary results, which I cannot discuss, as I unfortunately cannot see into the future. (Actually, I'm glad I can't see into the future, because if it's not going to be any better than the present, I don't want to know.) Instead I have to talk about something that has already happened, such as the Super Bowl.

Every year we have a Super Bowl party. To tell you the truth, I don't know exactly why. Neither of us follows football, nor do most of our friends. I think--and this is partly because our having it seems to have coincided with our move to the suburbs--that basically I see it as an annual rite, an ironic performance of my Americanness which simultaenously reminds me that I cannot escape my national identity, and that I will never be part of the American 'mainstream.' Plus it's an excuse to have a party without worrying about the state of your china or the nutrition content of the food. Every once in a while, I guess, my inner American has to come out and enjoy something big, fattening, and sloppy that leaves you with an unpleasant feeling of bloating and indigestion, and that's exactly what the Super Bowl is.

Since 9/11, however, the production into which network TV transforms the Super Bowl has started to take on more ominous overtones. Long ago George Carlin had a classic routine about what football really is, in which he emphasized the militaristic nature of the game's strategy, practices, and terminology. That has become even more obvious as the Super Bowl has become just another part of this administration's media blitz. Since 9/11 the pregame show has always incorporated some kind of video message from our troops in the field as well as a chat with George W. Bush; this year, George spent the whole time repeating the denunciation of steroids that was universally voted the most unsuccessful and irrelevant section of his most recent State of the Union speech. Meanwhile, our local paper carried a story about the Super Bowl party being hosted in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces in Tikrit. My partner said, "I'm not sure that sends the right message." I said, "I think that boat's already sailed."
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There was a lot more, but it's gone now,

The Plaid Adder

:( and your column is my favorite too! I know how it goes....had it happen more than once myself.....in fact it just did. I was responding to a thread while it was being locked....about a page worth of writing...I hit Post and the board flushed it down the toilet.

Thanks for sharing with us what you did manage to save! I think we need to assail our "left wing media" with much more regularity.

RC

If I was a girl and you were single I'd be chasing you all around :)

RC

You need to look into backing up your columns; looks like we missed a doozy!

In radio, the theory is that one's best work never gets recorded. For whatever reasons, the aircheck machine malfunctions, or the tape breaks five seconds in or the monitor that feeds the signal into the recorder suddenly malfunctions.

Bottom line, the best radio shows go up the tower and out into space in a straight line, leaving you NO PROOF that you created such a piece of art!

I believe you have now joined the club. I welcome you with a beer to cry in and I remind you that "Concupiscent Bootlicking Sycophants" is a GREAT phrase! I wish I had thought of it!

:toast:
dbt

Feel free to use "Concupiscent Bootlicking Sycophants" in casual conversation. I think it really sums them up.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

a great beginning... still, please keep up the good work! Thanks for the time and care you put into your column.

The "Concupiscent" section dealt with the halftime show. This is the part that I worked the most on, so I think I can remember it (seeing as I wrote it TWICE...@#$!$gnrgrngrrrr...

CONCUPISCENT

Understand, I am a marching band veteran. I know that the halftime show as a genre is never going to be the subject of a retrospective at the Met. One time long ago I was having lunch with an English friend of my father's and I tried to explain to him what marching bands do. I managed to convey that basically a bunch of people get tricked out in insane uniforms and walk around making interesting geometric patterns on the field while playing popular tunes that acquire a weird kind of gigantism after they have been arranged for 20 trumpets, a dozen sousaphones, a drumline 30 yards long and 150 flutes and clarinets that you STILL can't hear as a gaggle of twirlers, tumblers, and flingers of things cavort around them. He looked at me and said, "Why?" And of course there is no answer.

Halftime has always been about pure, pointless spectacle. But it used to be that the Super Bowl halftime show's main problem was an overload of wholesomeness. They'd truck in some group like "Up With (Perky White) People!" and do something unbearably cheesy and have a lot of people flip colored placards around on the field and eventually call it a day. But as the Super Bowl bloats on advertising revenues, the halftime show has also ballooned to a monstrous size, and now dorkiness is not enough. MTV has come to the halftime show, and the results are not pretty.



Then we moved to the rap segment of the program, and Kid Rock came bounding out wearing the American flag as a poncho. Doesn't anyone else see a problem with 'honoring' the flag by sweating into it? Do people really feel that Kid Rock's pit stains ennoble this inspiring symbol of American freedom? Is the idea that he's showing his respect for the flag by enriching it with his precious bodily fluids? In any case, we were all worried, as the jets of flame leaped higher behind him, that the poncho would catch fire. We could see the headlines: "KID ROCK SUPER BOWL TRAGEDY FUELS PUSH FOR FLAG-BURNING AMENDMENT."

And then there was Janet.

Back in the day, the video for "Rhythm Nation" made Janet one of the founding mothers of hip-hop. It made it all the more depressing to see what MTV did to it after spending 10-15 years refining its aesthetic of titillation. Basically, I think the music industry has been pushing its more-is-more, raunchier-is-better treatment of sex so aggressively that its audience is suffering a giant case of T&A fatigue. I blame Britney for much of this; she has really been working on emulating and even surpassing Madonna's sleaziness without incorporating any of the intelligence and creativity that used to drive it. So now, the unison step-show-esque choreography that made the original "Rhythm Nation" video so important has been transformed into a chaotic mess of writhing limbs and simulated sex performed by a harem of nubile young things who are all dressed as if they are the sales staff of Mad Max's Postapocalyptic Fetish Shop And Bordello. By the time Miss Jackson (if you're nasty) shows up, she's surrounded by so many nearly-naked bodies that you can't even focus on anything long enough to figure out what the hell is going on, let alone be aroused by it.

So by the time Justin Timberlake rips off half of Janet's bustier, why is anyone surprised? Tasteless? Prurient? Represents women as fetishized sex toys who can be violated at will for male pleasure? Hasn't that boat already sailed?

After all the skin they've already shown in this broadcast--from the gratuitous shots of the navel-baring cheerleaders to the army of tanned and toned blonde women who were climbing around on those wooden horses during Toby Keith's number to the harem of backup dancers--CBS is going to do the Puritan thing over one revealed breast? And why pick on the breast, anyway? It's OK for P. Diddy to perform his number with one hand on the family jewels at all time, but people can't handle Janet's breast? What are we, Ashcroft?

After all, there are things that are a lot more obscene than Janet Jackson's naked breast. A $1 trillion deficit, for instance.

More later if I can dredge it back up,

The Plaid Adder

Yeehaw! My flackery must be working!
Btw, expanding on something posted above:
If I were female, I wouldn't CARE if you (or I)were single or not!!!
My morals/ethics must not be firmly grounded...

C ya next week.

Whether or not they're a girl! I am a married woman. Or I would be, if it weren't for this @#$! country.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

RC

Did you see this thread?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=720411

but I think you have more than 3 loyal fans. Or maybe it's just 3 loyal (myself included) and the rest disloyal. Or maybe we're not fans, the word "fan" being derived from "fanatic." Maybe we're the kinder, gentler kind of fans. Maybe we're supporters. Or readers. Or fellow travelers. Or something.

What I mean is that I think more than 3 people might actually be disappointed about the absence of a Plaidder column this week. But I am very bad at math.

Yup, that's what I meant. Yup.

.

Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

;-)

I had to look 'concupiscent' up in the OED to make sure it meant what I thought it meant. It does!

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

Tomorrow let's do Anecdote of the Jar.

:pals: