Entry 14:

Hi again,

That Haacke story is priceless (what a name!). I especially love the detail of the curator pondering over the exact wording of the predictably pretentious labels for the exhibit (the "wall spiel," as Woody Allen called it in The New Yorker) --"to probe the foibles and perceived hypocrisies of blah blah." In this case, wouldn't it be better to go with something more minimalist, say, "Mean People Suck."

I'm not against political art per se, but the metaphors have to be more sophisticated than a high school senior's. Nancy Chunn, the New York artist who charmingly annotated the New York Times for a year in Crayola, knew how to handle Giuliani; with jokey Red Hots devil horns and a wink. Over the years, some of these Biennial types have come up with great sly digs. But for the most part they are tedious, especially on the subjects of modern politics and God. Tom Shales reviews in the Washington Post today the new cartoon God, the Devil and Bob. As you can imagine, the prospect of Hollywood inventing God for the children has the people I cover quivering with anger. But predictably, God turns out to be a toothless cliché, a geezer hippie who downs a few brewskies and frequents the strip joints. How original. (All the people who liked the movie Dogma: You are no longer my friends.)

As for that immigrant story, I'm afraid you're displaying a bit of that Haacke naiveté. This is the way immigrants have always made it to America, back to the Chinese railroad workers. They come when we need them, then hide when we don't. I say let them come, no matter how they get here. The more the merrier. My problem with this new policy is it puts INS agents in the role of God, judging souls: Weed out the bad ones, let the good ones stay. As we already know, their crude judgments have already produced some tragedies, petty teen-age thieves who have grown up in America and get shipped back to countries they've never been to, where in many cases they don't even speak the language.

On that hapless high-school basketball player, I'm afraid I have to disagree again. (Not even 9 a.m. and it's already our second fight of the day!) I feel your normally sweet-tempered self is too hard on these guys. The coaches tell these kids to "draw some blood," as this kid did, and when they are a bit too literal they get slammed. Especially in hockey. Slam your opponents head against the wall and they cheer. But wave the hockey stick in their face, well, that's just going too far. Plus you are catching me on the morning after a Knicks game, when a friend I was with reminded me of the New York press's smug and borderline-racist judgment that Latrell Sprewell was an irredeemable thug.  

Did you notice that the Washington Post, in preparation for political mourning, is full of ghosts today: a Fred Thompson lie, a Dan Burton subpoena, and that sad eugenics story of that poor Michigan man who'd been sterilized?

I've run out of time, but I just want to point out two wonderful foreign stories, as we've discussed none: Barry Bearak's story about the new girl's school in Afghanistan, and the Israeli court's decision that Jews can't keep Arabs out of their shiny new housing developments. Viva la Revolucion!

Sleepily,
H