The Sadness of America

[kent mueller]

Or any quote from Tom Waits "Step Right Up", one of the best white rap songs
ever. 

This all speaks directly to a basic American mythos of the whole carny, show
folk, Vaudeville, huckster vein that goes back at least as far as PT Barnum
and Huck Finn. Hucksterism is alive and well in American culture; yeah, the
last true traveling carnival Freak Show packed it in in '04, but tune in
almost any AM radio talk show and you'll hear plenty of commercials for
cure-alls, medicinal and financial, when the FDA, FCC or FTC or SEC can't be
far behind the promoters. And best of all, you get the actual talk show
host, including Rush Limbaugh, segueing from some allegedly serious
discussion/rant into an oily "Now Friends, have you ever...?"

It never dies, it just mutates. All that spam I get every day despite
precautions...

The Jewish thing in comedy (it's actually a show biz wide phenomena going
way back) is probably the same causal relationship that finds the typical
gardener today to be of Hispanic origin, the interior decorator of
yesteryear to be a gay male...it becomes a question of where society at
large would let one get a foothold at a given time. The entertainment
industry was notoriously liberal at an age when the rest of society was shut
off ("Show people, you know..." sniffed the respectable protestant
church-going lady..."No actors or dogs" read the sign at the respectable
hotel). Some friends of mine had a comedy troupe back in the '80s, and
they'd joke about forming the "Posse Comedy-tatis", which is only funny if
you know the weight the Posse Commitatus (a white supremacist movement) had
then in the '80s in areas like rural Wisconsin. But the idea of the skit
revolved around white non-Jewish, non-funny Midwestern comedians being
convinced that comedy was dominated by a Jewish cabal.

Of course, it's hard for me to tell, even though we share the same city, if
Dave Monroe is pulling a Seinfeld or an Andy Rooney here...

Kent


> From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
> Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:40:34 -0700 (PDT)
> To: Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com>
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: The Sadness of America
> 
> "Witches, warlocks, conjurers, sorcerers, black
> magicians, white magicians, are you having trouble
> mixing your potions in time for the winter solstice?
> Is your sorcery getting hung up because of the hours
> you spend mixing and blending your remedies? Then you
> need Rovco's amazing new witch's aid, the
> Super-Bat-O-Matic '77!"
> 
> http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76fbatomatic.phtml
> 
> --- Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Dave, I'm so disappointed that you missed my
>> Ronco/Popeil's/Tubes reference.
>> 
>> Bad TV commercials, especially the Veg-0-matic and
>> Pocket Fisherman or Ginsu type, are an unfortunate
>> cultural touchstone for us.  They really do say
>> something about America. Otherwise, you wouldn't
>> have the Bassomatic on SNL, or the Tubes song.
> 
> 
> 
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