My Sunday Feeling

 It took a couple of weeks longer than it should have.  But a couple of comedians finally took on Congressman George Santos (R-NY), he of the fluid sexual orientation and vocational history.  And imaginative accounting skills.    

SNL inexplicably put Bowen Yang as Santos on the fictional sidelines of an NFL game where he eventually appeared in drag, as Santos himself is alleged to have done during his salad days back in Brazil when his income is alleged to have consisted mainly of petty theft.  Next up on the Tonight show was the usually reliable Jon Lovitz who portrayed Santos as informed by his classic character, pathological liar Tommy Flanagan.  

You know what?  Neither performance was particularly funny.  Even Santos himself complained about them.  Indeed, I found SNL’s “NFL Today” parody the writers contrived to get Mr. Yang’s character on the sideline to be particularly unamusing.  

And I wondered, why didn’t these performers hit home runs?  Granted Mr. Yang’s oeuvre has always been a little “out there” for my tastes.  But I’ve always enjoyed the work of Jon Lovitz.  And after all you would think that a guy like Santos would pretty much write his own copy.  

Then it occurred to me.  Some people are beyond parody.  

Consider what parody of a person is.  It is when you take a sample from a person’s being-typically a person that is otherwise admired-an exaggerate it for laughs.  Think of recent Presidents.  Reagan and W typically have been portrayed as amiable boobs.  Obama as a diffident snob.  Clinton as, well, a horndog while his wife was portrayed in a pantsuit with a belly laugh that could shatter glass.  Trump with yellow hair and surrounded by lunatics. I don’t think they’ve quite figured Biden out yet.  Portraying him as burdened with a walker would be cruel.  And effective parody isn’t cruelty.  So you get the idea.

But the problem with trying to do a parody of Santos is two-fold.  First of all, most parodies are based on people with at lease a modicum of integrity although I’m pushing the example with Trump.  And Santos appears to have none.  Secondly, virtually everything he has told us about himself as been a complete fabrication.  Parody consists in exaggerating things that are familiar. Every politician lies at some point or another.  But I ain’t never seen nothing like George Santos.  

To paraphrase the old saying, when it comes to George Santos, there is no “there” “there.”  And maybe that’s why Yang and Lovitz couldn’t nail him.  There’s nothing familiar upon which to build a character.  

George Santos is a vacuous con artist who literally film-flammed his way into Congress despite all of the information we can easily gather on anybody nowadays.  His worst nightmare will be if he is ever forced to take an Oath to tell the truth as he is incapable of it.  We don’t even know if George Santos is his real name for God’s sake.  

A guy like that cannot be parodied.  Or as I frequently say, typically while wearing my lawyer hat, “you can’t make this up.”

And if you can’t make it up, you can’t make it funny.     

My Sunday Feeling

The news out of Cincinnati has been nothing short of miraculous.  By now everybody knows that Bills defensive back Demar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field last Monday night after getting hit in the chest by Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins during an otherwise unremarkable tackle.  Hamlin was swiftly attended to by trainers and doctors there on the floor or the stadium.  He was defibrillated at least once.  

At the hospital, he was placed in a coma and put on a ventilator.  As we have learned to our sorrow from the COVID pandemic, getting put on a vent is way serious business.  And it doesn’t much matter how young you are.

The good news here is that as of Friday afternoon the young man is breathing on his own and talking to doctors, teammates and family.  He seems to be neurologically intact.  So he’s past the two big hurdles.  Or biggest.  Hopefully this is a sign that he can be discharged soon and get about the business of healing and living his best life.  

There are people out there who want to take this opportunity to make this incident into a morality play about the whether it is appropriate for society to invest so much time, money and emotional energy into a sport that is as inherently dangerous as football. And I can have this discussion with those people.

However, the injury sustained by Hamlin is not so much a football thing as it is a fluky thing.  The leading theory on what happened to him is that his heart stopped beating due to a rare medical condition called commotio cordis which occurs when a severe blow to the chest results in an electrical impulse that causes the heart to stop beating.  According to what I have read, the condition is pretty much confined to children ages 8-18 who play contact sports.  Even at that, the odds of sustaining such an injury is around 40,000 to 1.  

Still, it happens.  And it kills about 25 children per year, mostly baseball and hockey players.  When I coached tee ball and Little League I constantly worried about a child taking a line drive or a bad hop to the chest.  Thank God it never happened, at least not bad enough to kill anybody.  Most bad hops with the little guys tended to go straight to the kisser.  And nobody ever died from a fat lip. A bag of ice while sitting with mom generally was the extent of the intervention required. 

So, if Hamlin’s near-death experience on the field is a fluke what lessons can we draw from this?  First and foremost we need personnel trained in the art of first aid at every ballgame at every level of sports.  Does this mean that you need the average 25 medical professionals that you can see on the sideline at any NFL game down at the girl’s softball league?  Of course not.  But every coach should be trained in CPR.  There should an ARD defibrillator at every venue where sports are played.  This is the lesson of Demar Hamlin. 

There’s another lesson as well.  We sometimes forget that there are good people in sports.  Who can forget the images of the players kneeled around the stricken Hamlin while he was attended to?  The sight of the Cincinnati coach consoling the coach of the Bills.  There is no professional sport that has its eye affixed to the bottom line like the NFL.  Not only did it suspend the game it ultimately cancelled it.  Rarely has the NFL and the Players Association ever agreed to anything so quickly.  And, last but not least, there was the grace extended by Demar Hamlin’s mother to Tee Higgins, when she assured him that she did not view him as responsible for her son’s plight.  The fact that he indeed was not responsible is beside the point.

I won’t disagree with anybody who says football at the NFL level is damn near a blood sport.  But what happened to Demar Hamlin is no proof of that.  

My New Year’s Day Feeling

As I have written before I’m not big on making New Year’s resolutions.  I guess that’s because, like most folks, I won’t keep them.  Secondly I guess we are all subject to superseding events not under our control.  Like a worldwide pandemic.  

 But I do have some intentions.  Like trying to figure why Blogger up and changes fonts on me and doesn’t allow me to correct it.  So now you’re stuck with reading the rest of this in Times New Roman or whatever this font has shifted to until such time as I figure it out.  

I guess the reason that I am going to stick my neck out with these lowly aspirations is that things finally seem “normal” around here for the first time in 3 years (I guess).  And let’s face it.  The last 3 years have sucked.  No 2 ways around it.  What’s normal?  

Let me start with this.  For the first time in 3 years the Deacon and I will be the only people living in this house.  Joe got a place of his own and hit the bricks the first of December after living here since graduation until he saved up his money and otherwise came to the conclusion that he didn’t want to live with his mom and her geezer husband anymore.  

So that will be interesting.  I remember when we first got married we used to go out all the time.  Mainly because she was tired after working and I am only marginally competent at vegan cuisine.  But will we go back to that?  I dunno.  

I pretty much quit playing guitar and doing photography during the plague.  I quit playing because the “open mic” stuff I used to do shut down.  And as far as I can tell has not come back.  Why I quit taking pictures I don’t know.  I also quit writing as much as I used to.  

I don’t know exactly why.  I think if I were being totally honest, which is a rare departure from standard practice so you better not get used to it Buster,  I think I just kind of shut down.  You now how some people, when faced with seemingly overwhelming and impossible odds, summon up the grit and courage to bravely face the storm and carry on come what may?

I guess I’m not one of those people.  Or at least I am no longer in that number.  I’ve become rather inert lately.  

I need to be ert again.

Maybe not as ert as Sarah, who spent New Year’s Eve in Cuba.  That’s a bit much for me.  You can do crazy stuff like that when you’re 25.  But it’s time for me to at least get back out there while I’m still relatively young and in possession of a quorum of marbles.  

So these are my intentions.  1) go back to the gym (so far so good) 2) write more (and figure out just WTF is going on with this damn font) 3) play guitar and take pictures again.  As the weather improves I’m going to play more golf.  Especially with my friend Wayne and his buddies.  Here’s how they play golf.  They play a scramble.  So far as I can tell only one guy keeps a score in his head. Which the rest of the group ignores. And everybody tees off from the women’s tee.  Much shit is talked for the entire 9 hole round.

Who knew that golf could be fun?  

The Deacon and my nephew Henry ,who is on the way to becoming a big noise in the arts, have encouraged me to sing again.  If I’m going to that means I better get going while still have a public A# and have not developed an “old lady” vibrato yet.  

So how much of this punch list will actually get done?  We’ll see.  Like most folks on the Internet I’m pretty tough behind the keyboard.    

Sarah told me that she would have me some cigars from Cuba next time I see her.  See?  2023 is starting off a whole lot better that 2002 did.  Not so good for old lady vibrato prevention maybe.  But it’s something to look forward to. 

Happy New Year!  

Right?