Mean Gene

Saving Face

For those of you who spent the weekend on tenterhooks wondering about my medical condition, I can say that I am definitely "better". Not 100%--oh, no no no no. Still lots of redness around the eyes, still have big red blotchy areas in places I'm too demure to go into further, and my left hand still looks like I stuck my hand into something I found bubbling in a chemistry lab. But I can see, I seem to have turned the corner.

Had a good weekend, ate too much, drank too much, watched lots of sports on TV. The anti-itch medication put me on my ass and knocked me out but good Saturday morning (tho going to bed at 5AM Friday probably helped. Played some poker, more about that in a later post. Finally got off the schneid (is that how it's spelled?).

Watched Pitt get embarassed by Ohio, watched my Lions feast upon Cinci, watched as Fast Willie Parker burst upon the NFL scene (any fantasy football types reading this might want to grab Mr. Parker ASAP, if you weren't savvy enough to grab him in a late round).

But before the Steeler game, a minor outrage. It's September 11th, and the house I was staying in is about a 15 minute drive from where Flight 93 went down. Our friends Frank and Heather went to see the temporary memorial on Saturday. I've always meant to take a left turn on the the way home and see it, but the permanent memorial design was just selected and I'll go see that when it's done. Anyway, I think the actual sites (including the Twin Towers and the Pentagon) should be left more to friends and family on this particular day. I can't say I did anything particularly patriotic or anything in remembrence, other than hanging out with my friends, tooling around the lake on the JetSki, and watching football.

But of course the mind returns to that day on its anniversary. Perhaps more so this year because of the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina. Once again we're all asked to chip in, help our fellow citizens, rally 'round. Just as on 9/11, we're all asked to do our little bit to help.

So the football games are about to start, and with the Steeler game in commercial we switched to Fox and their broadcast of the Washingon/Chicago game. The game is in DC, where the Pentagon was hit. And so they're going to have a musical tribute in honor of that day. And what to they do? They trot out the execrable Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey to get up on this elaborate stage on the field and lip-synch a predictably overwrought version of "America the Beautiful". Lachey does his flatlined slow-jams crooning, Simpson fractures the words "waves of grain" into 16 syllables, all the while her face is contorted into what are expressions of what passes as her emotions.

Ghastly. If the corporate powers-that-be want to shove this couple down our throats (as they've done with a plunger the last 2 or 3 years) that's their business. But on a day like 9/11, especially in a city where people lost their lives, couldn't the NFL or Daniel Snyder or whover the fuck thought this up come up with a better way to entertain the crowd than inflict these people on us yet again? Instead of the song being a celebration of our collective loss, pain, and resolution, it became a celebration of...Nick and Jessica. Why not ask everyone to stand up, read the words on the screen, and sing along together? Wouldn't that have been a much better way for the fans, all of whom have their own 9/11 memories, to share in the remeberance for this day?

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