Not Even God Is This Conceited...

I’ve never been much of a fan of the man’s writing (certainly not as big a fan as he is of his writing), but he can be wickedly and unashamedly hilarious, like a similar asshole partner in crime, James Wolcott. My inner cynic (okay, my inner AND outer cynics) needs/need to hang out with the likes of Vidal and Wolcott in small doses. I come away feeling smug, smart, and sullied, all at the same time. These were gleaned from a recent Gore montage in Esquire:

Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, “I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned.” And I said, You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?

When she was running for the Senate, Hillary’s psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately—I heard she said, “I remind them of their first wife.”

“You got to meet everyone—Jackie Kennedy, William Burroughs.” People always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the true way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to? Otherwise, it sounds like I spent my life hustling around trying to meet people: “Oh, look, there’s the governor. “

Regards the last quote, when he sez “People always put that sentence the wrong way around,” I thought he meant that they should list Burroughs before Jackie O (a sentiment I rather liked), but then that wouldn’t be Gore, now would it?

Don’t worry about those psephologists, they’re not contagious. Psephology is “simply” the “scientific” “study” of elections, and I’m sure Gore is one of six people on the planet who still knows that. Microsoft Word certainly doesn’t know, with its squiggly red line whispering “this word does not compute,” as I write this. Right click and MS Word offers the helpful alternative suggestion—straight facedly, I might add—of “psychologists.” From the Greek psephos: pebble, ballot, vote. Likely the reason why elections seem like folks throwing stones at each other; the Greeks started it all with voting with pebbles.

This post is proof positive that bloggers need church. I am home this morning, recuping a bit, and look at what strange bedfellows have crawled in, wanting to meet me.