THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

When the compassionately irreverent sex-advice columnist Dan Savage proclaims in a Tweet on March 13, after the big upset in Dixie, “Santorum… officially not funny any more,” maybe we should consider taking Rick’s own Cirque du Ridicule seriously.  After all, it is Savage who hammered a sizable dent in the Republican candidate’s reputation when he created the wildly popular neologism that Santorum means “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”

While I understand Savage’s alarm, the situation is actually funnier than ever, especially if you follow it with enough detachment not to get sucked up into any sort of panic.  True, there are various scenarios wherein the inmates could take over the asylum, but they are unlikely enough that we shouldn’t live in fear of them ever transpiring.

My friend and colleague, the honorary Ghey Jack Lechner, posted an item about the GOP race on Facebook this week with an even more Machiavellian view of the future than mine.  Coincidentally, Jack is the author of the lyrics for an award-winning musical based on Dan Savage’s quest to adopt a child with his boyfriend, The Kid, which ran Off-Broadway a couple of years ago to great critical acclaim.

The sometimes-rattling thing about Jack is he’s so right all the time that he has to punctuate opinions in meetings with, “I could be wrong.  I’ve been wrong before.”

And I invariably answer, “You have?”  Which is completely ridiculous because Jack is human and therefore occasionally fallible, but I am always both incredulous and somewhat hopeful that this time he might indeed be wrong and I don’t have to rewrite the greater portion of the second act of a script.  But he never is.

Unlike his muse Dan Savage, Jack has been rooting for Santorum to win the nomination “on the theory that he’ll lose to Obama in such a landslide that the Democrats will retake the House.”

Jack is rethinking the whole deal for an even more extended picture, which is that if Romney gets the nomination he will still lose to Obama, which will cause such a backlash among the lunatics who are trying to run the GOP that “they’ll nominate Santorum or someone worse (!) in 2016, who will lose in that landslide.”

So if Romney wins the nomination, the White House remains lunatic-free for at least another eight years.  Amazing how after the trauma of those eight years at the beginning of this century we have to think that way.  But with the current posse of feral theo-cons riding into town, I suppose we can be forgiven.

Jon Avalon in The Daily Beast concurs with Jack that Romney winning the nomination and then losing the election will cause the GOP to nominate a “true ideologue in 2016.”  But Avalon is happy for reasons that are more akin to my own: that this is what the GOP needs to hit rock bottom and finally clean house.

In another TDB interview with Marlow Stern, the articulate and rather brilliant Susan Sarandon (brilliant mainly because she likes my tattoos) also agreed with sentiments I’ve been blogging about for the past year:

“I just have to believe that the GOP just wrote off this time and said, ‘We don’t care. Anybody can run!’ ’Cause this can’t be the best they can do.”

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On the other hand, I am also confident that when the establishment Republicans are on a mission, they can be a fairly villainous bunch, all in the name of what they believe is right.  I’m sure they are aware of this, but I would strongly caution the Obama Administration to be careful of two forces that brought down Jimmy Carter: oil prices and the Iran hostage crisis.

As the son of a Reagan insider—who was also tangentially involved with the Iran-Contra Scandal, and who was buddies with a lot of Texan oil guys—I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Carter’s fall was rigged.  The Republicans colluded with OPEC to trigger the oil crisis, or made it worse than it needed to be, and the hostages weren’t released by those same ayatollahs the Republicans later sold arms to until St. Ronald came into power, when they were miraculously let go like so many peace doves in celebration.

If Susan and I are wrong and the GOP establishment is serious about trying to secure the presidency this term, I wouldn’t put it past them to concoct some other out-of-control international incident the Democrats can’t manage.  Fundamentalist thugs love and understand each other across religions.

I know: I’m sounding like some crackpot conspiracy theorist.  Today’s GOP isn’t my father’s.  Still, best to err on the side of caution.

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Über-bitch Gore Vidal once said, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”  I’ve always been fond of quoting that because it suits the image of the modern misanthrope I try so hard to cultivate.  So it was something of a surprise to me this week that I was so genuinely elated when our one-time Face of the Moment Jay Bulger won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at SXSW.  I’ve tried to examine the reasons I am so happy for him—and the editor we both work with, Abhay Sofsky—and the only thing I can come up with is I must pin my hopes and aspirations on Jay as a fellow high-functioning crazy person.

Another editor I work with, Alex Jablonski, also won the Audience Award for Emerging Visions at SXSW for his documentary Low & Clear.  Well done.

Finally, yet another dear friend and colleague, producer Carlo Dusi, has just joined Scott Free as their UK head of business.  Very wise move, Ridley and Tony: Carlo is a gem.

All in all, great week for some of my friends.  As another saying goes “a rising tide lifts all ships.”  I’ve got my sails up, guys!

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Just when I was thinking about becoming a monologist, prompted by the positive reactions to my Annie Girardot pieces and my reluctance to actually write a memoir, Mike Daisey goes and blows it for everyone by getting it so wrong about Apple’s allegedly poor working conditions in China—accusations that were just so 90s—that NPR’s This American Life has to dedicate this week’s program to retractions.  As I tweeted to @ThisAmerLife yesterday: “Never trust a fat man who exposes greed.”

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Once again, we have a winner of Schizo of the Week by default: Jason Russell, the creator of the super-viral #KONY 2012 campaign, who was caught off-his-face drunk masturbating in a parking lot in San Diego this week.

I wasn’t the first to notice that Russell not only has true “gay face,” but his behavior was suspiciously very like your typical Ghey on a Saturday night in West Hollywood at 2:10 AM after the bars have closed and the parking lots burst into an impromptu orgy of boozy last-minute hookups.  A follower of Dan Savage’s on Twitter wrote, “I did youth theatre with [Russell] – and this is what happens when you’re brainwashed and closeted.”

My own reaction to the story on Twitter was, “‘Malnourished and dehydrated’ means ‘hypoglycemic skinny bitch had no dinner, drank too much, and needed to be fully self-expressed.’”  But I’m always looking for the pathology behind a psychotic break.

Regardless of his behavior—and here at PFC we hardly consider public masturbation and drunkenness a bad thing—I extend the same offer I made to that other Christian closet case Marcus Bachmann in my own super-viral piece last year: We own you, Jason Russell.  You’ll always have a home among your true family.