Lily Salter's Blog, page 986

The Republican suicide ballad: The party that can’t govern, and the country that hates its guts

It is time once again to ponder the question of whether the Republican Party can be saved from itself – and if so, what exactly there is to save and why anyone should care. The GOP’s current struggle to find someone, or indeed anyone, who is willing to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives, the position once held by Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill – the president’s most important counterbalance and negotiating partner, and traditionally the second most powerful job in Washington – is of course a tragic and/or hilarious symptom of much deeper dysfunction. It’s always time for this question in the cracked crucible of 21st-century American politics, and when considered in full it reaches beyond the arena of Machiavellian power struggle into the abstract theological realm favored by Church scholastics of the Middle Ages. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Whatever the number is, it’s infinitely larger than the number of Republicans who want to pick up John Boehner’s poisoned gavel. How large are Heaven and Hell, measured in cubits and ells? Not large enough, it appears, to encompass the pride and arrogance of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of 40-odd far-right Jacobins who first sabotaged Boehner’s speakership and then torpedoed the candidacy of his chosen replacement, Kevin McCarthy. In the great tradition of doomed revolutionaries, the Freedom Caucus prefers death, or at least political annihilation – which will be theirs one day, and sooner than they think – to the dishonor of compromise. It’s easy to make fun of the vainglory and self-importance embodied in the group’s name, but it strikes me as accurate enough. They have declared themselves free of all the responsibilities of government, free from the need to discuss or negotiate or pass any legislation that has the slightest chance of being enacted. They represent freedom in precisely the same sense that death represents freedom from being alive. They could just as well be called the Suicide Caucus – or the Satanic Caucus, in the grandiose spirit of Milton’s fallen angel, who fights on with no hope of victory: “To do ought good never will be our task,/ But ever to do ill our sole delight.” I imagine that when we all come back to work on Monday we will find that Paul Ryan has been arm-twisted into filling the role, at least for the next 14 months. But you can’t really blame Ryan, who is devious and intelligent and would like to be president someday, for feeling reluctant to commit political hara-kiri in this fashion. Even before the Republican Party constructed an alternate universe around itself and blotted out political reality, the speaker’s gavel was a final destination, not a pathway to anything larger. As numerous historical articles have now informed us, the last (and only) former House Speaker to move on to the White House was James K. Polk in 1844, and that happened after he had left Congress and served a term as governor of Tennessee. In any event, the fiscal whiz kid of Janesville, Wisconsin, is no better than a Band-Aid applied to the GOP’s gaping wound. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the Republicans were boring and small-minded but not especially crazy. They pursued a disastrous foreign-policy agenda during the Cold War, but they were not alone in that, and one could argue that marked the first stages of betraying the tradition of Edmund Burke-style conservatism. On fiscal and social issues, they stood with country-club middle management and small-town Presbyterians and the affluent families who owned the third-largest bank in Indiana or a chain of hardware stores in and around San Diego. I’ve written previously that Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower resemble Leon Trotsky on a crack bender compared to today’s Republicans. On a more personal level the GOP past will always be embodied for me by Mrs. Supinger, who was the postmistress in the tiny California town where I spent much of my childhood. A severe but polite lady whose hair was always immovably styled and gelled and set in the mode of roughly 1956 (even though there was no beauty parlor within 15 miles), Mrs. Supinger was seen to weep bitterly after Nixon resigned in the summer of 1974, and refused to remove his official portrait from the post-office wall. Maybe that act of civil disobedience – which, in all honesty, I still find perversely admirable – was the beginning of the Republican embrace of "No," the nihilistic or Satanic refusal that has poisoned the contemporary political climate. But if Mrs. Supinger is watching us now, from a high-backed armchair whose lace-covered armrests never need mending, I can’t imagine that she’s pleased to see her beloved party in ruins. Of course I believe that the Republicans have brought their gruesome predicament upon themselves and that they richly deserve their fate, although they have certainly been nudged toward the precipice by Democratic cowardice and incompetence. Some degree of liberal Schadenfreude is irresistible, and I too cackled when Nancy Pelosi was asked why nobody wanted to be speaker and responded, “You’ll just have to ask nobody.” But this ugly spectacle could have dire consequences for the country, in the near future and for a long time to come. Whoever the GOP shoves to the podium, whether it’s Ryan or Darrell Issa or Jason Chaffetz or someone even dumber than them, will either have to default on the national debt in November and shut down the government in December or face yet another enraged right-wing revolt. Either way, this Congress (and most likely the next one too, regardless of who is elected president) is a lost cause, and the future viability of bipartisan politics is very much in doubt. Dear Mrs. Supinger, I will try to explain: Even though the pundit class keeps on telling us that order will eventually be restored in the Republican presidential campaign – in the form of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, presumably – I suspect they’ve been smoking that stuff that President Nixon told you was sapping the national morale. At this writing, the leading candidates are still a deranged billionaire who makes impossible promises, a retired black doctor who says outrageous things in a quiet voice, and a likable woman who was a spectacular failure in the business world before she became a spectacular failure in politics. No, I’m not kidding! And none of those people has ever been elected to anything, including church deacon, yearbook president or assistant treasurer of the Ayn Rand fan club. How did that happen? And what does the crazy-time presidential race have to do with the fact that the Republicans hold their largest congressional majority since 1931 – 247 of the 435 House members – but still can’t find anybody who can win the speakership in a floor vote? Well, Mrs. S, the secret is that nobody actually likes the Republican Party, as it currently exists. The American public is divided between those who hate the Republicans for being irrational and intransigent and racist, and those who hate them for not being irrational and intransigent and racist enough. The only people who still feel affection toward the “Republican brand” are you and a tiny handful of extremely rich people, and since you’re dead you technically don’t count. That big Republican victory in the 2014 midterms was a masterfully engineered work of fiction – an artifact of voter suppression, voter apathy and the intensive gerrymandering imposed by GOP-dominated state legislatures after the 2010 census. Republican candidates won barely 51 percent of the vote, but thanks to the imaginative redistricting plans imposed in numerous states, that modest margin was dramatically overrepresented in the final result. Even more important, voter turnout fell to 36.6 percent, the lowest in any national election for more than 70 years. Just under 40 million people actually voted for Republicans, while 35.4 million voted for Democrats. That was the lowest Democratic total in 12 years – and also the lowest GOP total in eight years. Compare those numbers to the Obama re-election year of 2012, when Democratic congressional candidates attracted almost 60 million votes (and still lost seats thanks to the gerrymander), or to the electoral bonanza of 2008, when they got more than 65 million votes. So on one hand, nearly 30 million Democratic votes have vanished into thin air over the course of the last six years, which has been catastrophic to the party’s dreams of a semi-permanent electoral majority. But that doesn’t mean those people switched sides. The Republicans lost voters by the bucket-load too, just on a less epic scale. Their supposedly glorious 2014 victory required 18 million fewer votes than their record high total of 2012 – which was not enough to win the overall popular vote. In other words, Mrs. Supinger, the Republicans won their gigantic majority by poisoning and paralyzing the government like a Boehner-headed giant scorpion, and now they must face the consequences. They convinced enormous numbers of Democrats and lots of moderate Republicans to give up and stay home because American politics had become worthless and terrible, a conclusion that is difficult to fault. They appealed almost exclusively to their angriest, most zealous and most overtly racist base voters, a loud but relatively small minority of the general population who cannot be called “conservative” in any sense of the word. These are the people who constantly yammer for more tax cuts, in a country where income-tax rates, especially for the wealthiest citizens, are far below those our grandparents paid in the 1950s. They want all the Mexicans deported, even though illegal immigration is clearly an economic benefit (and is declining on its own). They want to slash social spending to levels that would make the 2008 recession look like a nationwide beach vacation. They want to defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, and make steep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security – and the only good thing about their agenda is that since they can’t have all of it, they don’t want any of it. Now the Republicans in Congress, along with the “mainstream” or “establishment” Republican presidential candidates, are discovering what should have been obvious all along: The Frankenstein voter base they bred and nurtured with so much money and so much cunning does not like them or trust them. The fanatics of the Satanic Suicide Caucus and their supporters do not want the current Republican leadership to govern anything, or even try to. They have devoured the old Republican Party of Mrs. Supinger’s day from within, like an alien parasite. When they repeat its catchphrases about fiscal responsibility and social order in their metallic parasite voices, what they really mean is fiscal holocaust, social anarchy and class war against poor women, black people and immigrants. They dream of conquest, but whatever they can’t conquer – starting with their own political party – they will happily destroy.It is time once again to ponder the question of whether the Republican Party can be saved from itself – and if so, what exactly there is to save and why anyone should care. The GOP’s current struggle to find someone, or indeed anyone, who is willing to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives, the position once held by Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill – the president’s most important counterbalance and negotiating partner, and traditionally the second most powerful job in Washington – is of course a tragic and/or hilarious symptom of much deeper dysfunction. It’s always time for this question in the cracked crucible of 21st-century American politics, and when considered in full it reaches beyond the arena of Machiavellian power struggle into the abstract theological realm favored by Church scholastics of the Middle Ages. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Whatever the number is, it’s infinitely larger than the number of Republicans who want to pick up John Boehner’s poisoned gavel. How large are Heaven and Hell, measured in cubits and ells? Not large enough, it appears, to encompass the pride and arrogance of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of 40-odd far-right Jacobins who first sabotaged Boehner’s speakership and then torpedoed the candidacy of his chosen replacement, Kevin McCarthy. In the great tradition of doomed revolutionaries, the Freedom Caucus prefers death, or at least political annihilation – which will be theirs one day, and sooner than they think – to the dishonor of compromise. It’s easy to make fun of the vainglory and self-importance embodied in the group’s name, but it strikes me as accurate enough. They have declared themselves free of all the responsibilities of government, free from the need to discuss or negotiate or pass any legislation that has the slightest chance of being enacted. They represent freedom in precisely the same sense that death represents freedom from being alive. They could just as well be called the Suicide Caucus – or the Satanic Caucus, in the grandiose spirit of Milton’s fallen angel, who fights on with no hope of victory: “To do ought good never will be our task,/ But ever to do ill our sole delight.” I imagine that when we all come back to work on Monday we will find that Paul Ryan has been arm-twisted into filling the role, at least for the next 14 months. But you can’t really blame Ryan, who is devious and intelligent and would like to be president someday, for feeling reluctant to commit political hara-kiri in this fashion. Even before the Republican Party constructed an alternate universe around itself and blotted out political reality, the speaker’s gavel was a final destination, not a pathway to anything larger. As numerous historical articles have now informed us, the last (and only) former House Speaker to move on to the White House was James K. Polk in 1844, and that happened after he had left Congress and served a term as governor of Tennessee. In any event, the fiscal whiz kid of Janesville, Wisconsin, is no better than a Band-Aid applied to the GOP’s gaping wound. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the Republicans were boring and small-minded but not especially crazy. They pursued a disastrous foreign-policy agenda during the Cold War, but they were not alone in that, and one could argue that marked the first stages of betraying the tradition of Edmund Burke-style conservatism. On fiscal and social issues, they stood with country-club middle management and small-town Presbyterians and the affluent families who owned the third-largest bank in Indiana or a chain of hardware stores in and around San Diego. I’ve written previously that Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower resemble Leon Trotsky on a crack bender compared to today’s Republicans. On a more personal level the GOP past will always be embodied for me by Mrs. Supinger, who was the postmistress in the tiny California town where I spent much of my childhood. A severe but polite lady whose hair was always immovably styled and gelled and set in the mode of roughly 1956 (even though there was no beauty parlor within 15 miles), Mrs. Supinger was seen to weep bitterly after Nixon resigned in the summer of 1974, and refused to remove his official portrait from the post-office wall. Maybe that act of civil disobedience – which, in all honesty, I still find perversely admirable – was the beginning of the Republican embrace of "No," the nihilistic or Satanic refusal that has poisoned the contemporary political climate. But if Mrs. Supinger is watching us now, from a high-backed armchair whose lace-covered armrests never need mending, I can’t imagine that she’s pleased to see her beloved party in ruins. Of course I believe that the Republicans have brought their gruesome predicament upon themselves and that they richly deserve their fate, although they have certainly been nudged toward the precipice by Democratic cowardice and incompetence. Some degree of liberal Schadenfreude is irresistible, and I too cackled when Nancy Pelosi was asked why nobody wanted to be speaker and responded, “You’ll just have to ask nobody.” But this ugly spectacle could have dire consequences for the country, in the near future and for a long time to come. Whoever the GOP shoves to the podium, whether it’s Ryan or Darrell Issa or Jason Chaffetz or someone even dumber than them, will either have to default on the national debt in November and shut down the government in December or face yet another enraged right-wing revolt. Either way, this Congress (and most likely the next one too, regardless of who is elected president) is a lost cause, and the future viability of bipartisan politics is very much in doubt. Dear Mrs. Supinger, I will try to explain: Even though the pundit class keeps on telling us that order will eventually be restored in the Republican presidential campaign – in the form of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, presumably – I suspect they’ve been smoking that stuff that President Nixon told you was sapping the national morale. At this writing, the leading candidates are still a deranged billionaire who makes impossible promises, a retired black doctor who says outrageous things in a quiet voice, and a likable woman who was a spectacular failure in the business world before she became a spectacular failure in politics. No, I’m not kidding! And none of those people has ever been elected to anything, including church deacon, yearbook president or assistant treasurer of the Ayn Rand fan club. How did that happen? And what does the crazy-time presidential race have to do with the fact that the Republicans hold their largest congressional majority since 1931 – 247 of the 435 House members – but still can’t find anybody who can win the speakership in a floor vote? Well, Mrs. S, the secret is that nobody actually likes the Republican Party, as it currently exists. The American public is divided between those who hate the Republicans for being irrational and intransigent and racist, and those who hate them for not being irrational and intransigent and racist enough. The only people who still feel affection toward the “Republican brand” are you and a tiny handful of extremely rich people, and since you’re dead you technically don’t count. That big Republican victory in the 2014 midterms was a masterfully engineered work of fiction – an artifact of voter suppression, voter apathy and the intensive gerrymandering imposed by GOP-dominated state legislatures after the 2010 census. Republican candidates won barely 51 percent of the vote, but thanks to the imaginative redistricting plans imposed in numerous states, that modest margin was dramatically overrepresented in the final result. Even more important, voter turnout fell to 36.6 percent, the lowest in any national election for more than 70 years. Just under 40 million people actually voted for Republicans, while 35.4 million voted for Democrats. That was the lowest Democratic total in 12 years – and also the lowest GOP total in eight years. Compare those numbers to the Obama re-election year of 2012, when Democratic congressional candidates attracted almost 60 million votes (and still lost seats thanks to the gerrymander), or to the electoral bonanza of 2008, when they got more than 65 million votes. So on one hand, nearly 30 million Democratic votes have vanished into thin air over the course of the last six years, which has been catastrophic to the party’s dreams of a semi-permanent electoral majority. But that doesn’t mean those people switched sides. The Republicans lost voters by the bucket-load too, just on a less epic scale. Their supposedly glorious 2014 victory required 18 million fewer votes than their record high total of 2012 – which was not enough to win the overall popular vote. In other words, Mrs. Supinger, the Republicans won their gigantic majority by poisoning and paralyzing the government like a Boehner-headed giant scorpion, and now they must face the consequences. They convinced enormous numbers of Democrats and lots of moderate Republicans to give up and stay home because American politics had become worthless and terrible, a conclusion that is difficult to fault. They appealed almost exclusively to their angriest, most zealous and most overtly racist base voters, a loud but relatively small minority of the general population who cannot be called “conservative” in any sense of the word. These are the people who constantly yammer for more tax cuts, in a country where income-tax rates, especially for the wealthiest citizens, are far below those our grandparents paid in the 1950s. They want all the Mexicans deported, even though illegal immigration is clearly an economic benefit (and is declining on its own). They want to slash social spending to levels that would make the 2008 recession look like a nationwide beach vacation. They want to defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, and make steep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security – and the only good thing about their agenda is that since they can’t have all of it, they don’t want any of it. Now the Republicans in Congress, along with the “mainstream” or “establishment” Republican presidential candidates, are discovering what should have been obvious all along: The Frankenstein voter base they bred and nurtured with so much money and so much cunning does not like them or trust them. The fanatics of the Satanic Suicide Caucus and their supporters do not want the current Republican leadership to govern anything, or even try to. They have devoured the old Republican Party of Mrs. Supinger’s day from within, like an alien parasite. When they repeat its catchphrases about fiscal responsibility and social order in their metallic parasite voices, what they really mean is fiscal holocaust, social anarchy and class war against poor women, black people and immigrants. They dream of conquest, but whatever they can’t conquer – starting with their own political party – they will happily destroy.

Continue Reading...

Amy Schumer’s “SNL” genius: Tonight’s challenge, topping herself

It's been Amy Schumer's year — a critically acclaimed comedy show, an Emmy, and a hit movie that helped debunk the myth that no one wants to watch comedies with female leads — so of course she's hosting "Saturday Night Live" this weekend. Considering that she's the host and star of her own sketch comedy show, this one has a good chance to be a stronger episode than those that have to work around people who aren't comedy actors, or even actors at all. Of course, the real question is whether or not "Saturday Night Live" can or will even bother to come close to some of the searing satire that Schumer brings to her own show, "Inside Amy Schumer." Like most sketch comedy shows, "Inside Amy Schumer" is hit-or-miss, but when it hits, most frequently on the topic of gender relations, it's often some of the funniest and most insightful stuff on TV. Also now one of the most innovative. The stand-out episode of the season was an episode-long sketch that parodied the '60s-era drama "12 Angry Men," except instead of debating whether a defendant is guilty, the men were debating whether Amy was hot enough to be on basic cable. It really shouldn't have worked, between the outdated reference and the fact that most sketches are too long at 5 minutes. But somehow it came together to be one of the most memorable moments in Comedy Central's history, up there with the best "Chappelle Show" episodes and some early "South Park." It worked for the reason that a lot of Schumer's best comedy bits about gender and sexism work, because Schumer really gets, and is totally unafraid of targeting, the culture of toxic masculinity. Watching the "12 Angry Men" episode, it quickly becomes apparent that the ostensible topic — Schumer's looks — isn't really the point of it at all. Instead, Schumer is targeting the way that men talk about women's bodies as a way to bolster their own egos and try to impress other men. Deigning a woman "hot or not" has little to do with actual sexual attraction and everything to do with trying to make other men think of you as studly and powerful, powerful enough to wave away a woman's body as if you're a king on a throne, declining gifts from your simpering supplicants. But what makes the sketch really next level is that it when it turns, it does so in a humanizing, though still hilarious way. One by one, the men start to crack, admitting in turn that they don't actually think that Amy is some kind of hideous troll. And while none of them end up coming across as some kind of prince, it cleverly revealed the core of vulnerability and fear that often lays behind this kind of masculine bravado. Months before the #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag took off on Twitter, Schumer had created the masterpiece on the theme. Many of her best sketches send up male entitlement in just this way. "Football Town Nights," a parody of "Friday Night Lights" with Josh Charles as the football coach, perfectly nailed the way that so many men, usually seen overwhelming the comment sections on any online article on rape, try to find some kind of exception to the don't-have-sex-without-consent rule. "Last F*ckable Day" zeroed in on way that male-run Hollywood wants to put women out to sea for daring to age in the same way men are allowed to do. My personal favorite, however, might be "Hello M'Lady," an ad for a fake smartphone app to help women manage those self-proclaimed "nice guys" that linger around, hoping that if they do you enough favors, you'll end up feeling guilty and repay the debt by reluctantly starting a relationship with them. Clever for noticing how often this happens, genius for showing that such guys aren't nice at all, but have an overwhelming sense of entitlement that leads them to think they are owed a relationship with a woman just because they put in some time, regardless of what she actually wants for herself. Bonus points because the sketch drew a number of angry comments from men who saw themselves in the sketch and were defensive about it, and angry at women for not wanting to play their game. Not that Schumer reserves her mockery only for men and their delusions. She teases women all the time on her show. She especially takes pleasure in sending up women that are, for lack of a better term, basic: Unimaginative and incurious, obnoxious and privileged, hungry for male attention and callous to the feelings of others. She does this by playing a character, who is usually named "Amy", that exhibits all these traits and who does things like uses the occasion of a bridesmaid's toast to remind everyone that she's had sex with the groom before. (This character is on full display in the promos for "Saturday Night Live," where Schumer pretends to forget Vanessa Bayer's name.) Playing a character with the same name as yourself to explore some of your ugliest urges and desires is hardly unknown in comedy, of course. Louis CK does it on "Louie" and Larry David mastered the form on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." But Amy's spin on the form is a specifically feminine one, exploring the specific ways the urge to be a boor manifests itself in women, who aren't allowed the same cultural room for open aggression as men. Hopefully, the writing staff at "Saturday Night Live" will channel a little of the sharp insight of "Inside Amy Schumer" about gender and culture. But even if they don't, it'll still be worth turning in to see this rising star return to the live comedy format where she cut her teeth.It's been Amy Schumer's year — a critically acclaimed comedy show, an Emmy, and a hit movie that helped debunk the myth that no one wants to watch comedies with female leads — so of course she's hosting "Saturday Night Live" this weekend. Considering that she's the host and star of her own sketch comedy show, this one has a good chance to be a stronger episode than those that have to work around people who aren't comedy actors, or even actors at all. Of course, the real question is whether or not "Saturday Night Live" can or will even bother to come close to some of the searing satire that Schumer brings to her own show, "Inside Amy Schumer." Like most sketch comedy shows, "Inside Amy Schumer" is hit-or-miss, but when it hits, most frequently on the topic of gender relations, it's often some of the funniest and most insightful stuff on TV. Also now one of the most innovative. The stand-out episode of the season was an episode-long sketch that parodied the '60s-era drama "12 Angry Men," except instead of debating whether a defendant is guilty, the men were debating whether Amy was hot enough to be on basic cable. It really shouldn't have worked, between the outdated reference and the fact that most sketches are too long at 5 minutes. But somehow it came together to be one of the most memorable moments in Comedy Central's history, up there with the best "Chappelle Show" episodes and some early "South Park." It worked for the reason that a lot of Schumer's best comedy bits about gender and sexism work, because Schumer really gets, and is totally unafraid of targeting, the culture of toxic masculinity. Watching the "12 Angry Men" episode, it quickly becomes apparent that the ostensible topic — Schumer's looks — isn't really the point of it at all. Instead, Schumer is targeting the way that men talk about women's bodies as a way to bolster their own egos and try to impress other men. Deigning a woman "hot or not" has little to do with actual sexual attraction and everything to do with trying to make other men think of you as studly and powerful, powerful enough to wave away a woman's body as if you're a king on a throne, declining gifts from your simpering supplicants. But what makes the sketch really next level is that it when it turns, it does so in a humanizing, though still hilarious way. One by one, the men start to crack, admitting in turn that they don't actually think that Amy is some kind of hideous troll. And while none of them end up coming across as some kind of prince, it cleverly revealed the core of vulnerability and fear that often lays behind this kind of masculine bravado. Months before the #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag took off on Twitter, Schumer had created the masterpiece on the theme. Many of her best sketches send up male entitlement in just this way. "Football Town Nights," a parody of "Friday Night Lights" with Josh Charles as the football coach, perfectly nailed the way that so many men, usually seen overwhelming the comment sections on any online article on rape, try to find some kind of exception to the don't-have-sex-without-consent rule. "Last F*ckable Day" zeroed in on way that male-run Hollywood wants to put women out to sea for daring to age in the same way men are allowed to do. My personal favorite, however, might be "Hello M'Lady," an ad for a fake smartphone app to help women manage those self-proclaimed "nice guys" that linger around, hoping that if they do you enough favors, you'll end up feeling guilty and repay the debt by reluctantly starting a relationship with them. Clever for noticing how often this happens, genius for showing that such guys aren't nice at all, but have an overwhelming sense of entitlement that leads them to think they are owed a relationship with a woman just because they put in some time, regardless of what she actually wants for herself. Bonus points because the sketch drew a number of angry comments from men who saw themselves in the sketch and were defensive about it, and angry at women for not wanting to play their game. Not that Schumer reserves her mockery only for men and their delusions. She teases women all the time on her show. She especially takes pleasure in sending up women that are, for lack of a better term, basic: Unimaginative and incurious, obnoxious and privileged, hungry for male attention and callous to the feelings of others. She does this by playing a character, who is usually named "Amy", that exhibits all these traits and who does things like uses the occasion of a bridesmaid's toast to remind everyone that she's had sex with the groom before. (This character is on full display in the promos for "Saturday Night Live," where Schumer pretends to forget Vanessa Bayer's name.) Playing a character with the same name as yourself to explore some of your ugliest urges and desires is hardly unknown in comedy, of course. Louis CK does it on "Louie" and Larry David mastered the form on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." But Amy's spin on the form is a specifically feminine one, exploring the specific ways the urge to be a boor manifests itself in women, who aren't allowed the same cultural room for open aggression as men. Hopefully, the writing staff at "Saturday Night Live" will channel a little of the sharp insight of "Inside Amy Schumer" about gender and culture. But even if they don't, it'll still be worth turning in to see this rising star return to the live comedy format where she cut her teeth.

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“Death doesn’t come like it does in the movies:” What my mother’s last days taught me about our right to die

My mom died three weeks ago. She had ovarian cancer. Or what they suspect started as ovarian cancer. By the time the CT scan was finally ordered, the disease had spread throughout her pelvis.

When my friends ask how I’m doing, I say, “I am full of grilief.” Grief for what my mom endured. Relief that it’s finally over. Grilief.

During the 99 days between Mom’s diagnosis and death, she was either undergoing chemotherapy, dealing with the side effects of chemo or seeking ways to relieve her pain. Her hair fell out. She couldn’t eat. She grew weaker and weaker. A tube was placed in her abdomen to drain the fluid. She looked like a cruel science experiment. On her 77th birthday, her doctor told her the chemo had not worked; the cancer had spread. There was nothing more they could do.

That’s when my dad, two sisters and I began caring for her at home. It was easy at first. We helped her sit up, squirted Roxanol under her tongue. “I’m soooooo happy,” she’d say as the drugs kicked in and we tucked her back in bed. 

Baby Bird, we called her.

We thought this was how it would all go down. We’d keep giving her drugs until she died of happiness. But that, we came to learn, is the easy road to death. There is another road, a road euphemistically called “the difficult road.” 

For reasons we may never fully understand, Mom began to suffer from something called terminal agitation, which sounds like something you might experience at an airport when your flight is delayed. But it was nothing like that. 

Mom begged to be put to sleep, then begged for her old life back. She stayed awake for 48 hours straight, talking to herself. She complained that my dad smelled like tomato soup. She told a hospice nurse that we were withholding food from her. She flailed her arms and spouted premonitions about the daughter of a local meteorologist. 

Our mom had been a sweet, well-mannered woman known for countless acts of kindness. This was not our mom. 

We called this person Dark Mom.

The change in Mom’s behavior was shocking and bewildering. And, we later learned, not uncommon. According to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and Hospice Pharmacia, 42 percent of dying patients experience some form of terminal restlessness in the final 48 hours of life. Mom’s agitation lasted five days.

When we could no longer care for her at home, Mom was taken by ambulance to a hospice facility. She insisted she had arrived by airplane. She slung insults, called the nurses “novices.” She tried to hitch her bed sheet to the ceiling fan and climb to freedom. She asked for a gun.

Kimmy, one of the nurses, told me I would miss this phase of Mom’s journey. 

“There is no way,” I told her.

But Kimmy was right. 

By the time the hospice staff got Mom’s agitation under control, she became unresponsive. She lay with her mouth open, gazing into space. Her breath grew shallow, irregular. She ran fevers, her fingertips turned blue, the skin of her face turned orange, then white, then gray. Her left ear lost its familiar shape.

While we waited for Mom to die, my sisters and I whispered to the nurses. “Isn’t there something you can give her to help her along?”

“Everyone asks us that,” they said.

The nurses did everything in their power to make Mom comfortable. They administered her meds, bathed her, swabbed her dry mouth with a tiny blue sponge, and worked in tandem to gently move Mom from her side, to her back, to her other side. 

Despite their efforts, Mom’s brow was often furrowed. Her exhale had that sharp sound you make after a hard cry. When Dad kissed her and stroked her cheek, tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. 

On Monday, we learned that the governor of California, Jerry Brown, had signed a measure to help terminally ill people end their lives.

Before Mom’s cancer took her down the “difficult road,” my sisters and I had never given assisted dying much thought. If I’d heard about a proposal to give doctors the right to prescribe lethal doses of painkillers to terminally ill patients with less than six months to live, I wouldn’t have opposed it, but I might not have considered it an essential and deeply humane piece of legislation, as I do now. I still recognize the medical and religious reasons many hold for opposing it, but having watched someone I love suffer at the end the way my mother did, I could not in good conscience feel anything but gratitude toward this measure. We don’t know if Mom would have wanted a physician-assisted death if it had been available in our state. But watching her die — knowing that there are so many others out there who suffered longer and without hospice support — made us wish that everyone at least had the option.

One of the great accomplishments of 21st-century medicine is our ability to mitigate and abbreviate pain, to spare patients needless anguish. When we were caring for Mom at home, a hospice nurse brought us a “comfort pack” of medications, which we stored in the refrigerator and used to ease her pain, delirium and anxiety — common symptoms in terminally ill patients. Once she was taken to the hospice facility, the nurses administered these medications under a doctor’s supervision. But because her symptoms were constantly shifting and magnifying, the dosages changed too, and it soon became impossible for my family to distinguish which of Mom’s symptoms were due to the disease process and which were due to side effects of the meds. We agonized over her agony, and I wondered why, if there were medications available to “cure” Mom, to completely eliminate her suffering and transport her with love to her ultimate destination, should she not have the right to that medication if she wanted it? Having watched what she went through, I would certainly want it for myself.

Everyone knows that death is inevitable, but we don’t spend enough time talking about the reality of it. Death doesn’t come like it does in the movies. You don’t always say something profound, close your eyes, and drift away. Death can be protracted, ugly and painful, and we can’t remove grief from the process of dying and letting loved ones go. But surely we can pass laws to give people the option to die without suffering needlessly. 

My older sister and I had the honor of holding Mom’s hand when she finally passed from this world. A wave of grief washed over us, followed by a wave of relief. 

My mom died three weeks ago. She had ovarian cancer. Or what they suspect started as ovarian cancer. By the time the CT scan was finally ordered, the disease had spread throughout her pelvis.

When my friends ask how I’m doing, I say, “I am full of grilief.” Grief for what my mom endured. Relief that it’s finally over. Grilief.

During the 99 days between Mom’s diagnosis and death, she was either undergoing chemotherapy, dealing with the side effects of chemo or seeking ways to relieve her pain. Her hair fell out. She couldn’t eat. She grew weaker and weaker. A tube was placed in her abdomen to drain the fluid. She looked like a cruel science experiment. On her 77th birthday, her doctor told her the chemo had not worked; the cancer had spread. There was nothing more they could do.

That’s when my dad, two sisters and I began caring for her at home. It was easy at first. We helped her sit up, squirted Roxanol under her tongue. “I’m soooooo happy,” she’d say as the drugs kicked in and we tucked her back in bed. 

Baby Bird, we called her.

We thought this was how it would all go down. We’d keep giving her drugs until she died of happiness. But that, we came to learn, is the easy road to death. There is another road, a road euphemistically called “the difficult road.” 

For reasons we may never fully understand, Mom began to suffer from something called terminal agitation, which sounds like something you might experience at an airport when your flight is delayed. But it was nothing like that. 

Mom begged to be put to sleep, then begged for her old life back. She stayed awake for 48 hours straight, talking to herself. She complained that my dad smelled like tomato soup. She told a hospice nurse that we were withholding food from her. She flailed her arms and spouted premonitions about the daughter of a local meteorologist. 

Our mom had been a sweet, well-mannered woman known for countless acts of kindness. This was not our mom. 

We called this person Dark Mom.

The change in Mom’s behavior was shocking and bewildering. And, we later learned, not uncommon. According to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and Hospice Pharmacia, 42 percent of dying patients experience some form of terminal restlessness in the final 48 hours of life. Mom’s agitation lasted five days.

When we could no longer care for her at home, Mom was taken by ambulance to a hospice facility. She insisted she had arrived by airplane. She slung insults, called the nurses “novices.” She tried to hitch her bed sheet to the ceiling fan and climb to freedom. She asked for a gun.

Kimmy, one of the nurses, told me I would miss this phase of Mom’s journey. 

“There is no way,” I told her.

But Kimmy was right. 

By the time the hospice staff got Mom’s agitation under control, she became unresponsive. She lay with her mouth open, gazing into space. Her breath grew shallow, irregular. She ran fevers, her fingertips turned blue, the skin of her face turned orange, then white, then gray. Her left ear lost its familiar shape.

While we waited for Mom to die, my sisters and I whispered to the nurses. “Isn’t there something you can give her to help her along?”

“Everyone asks us that,” they said.

The nurses did everything in their power to make Mom comfortable. They administered her meds, bathed her, swabbed her dry mouth with a tiny blue sponge, and worked in tandem to gently move Mom from her side, to her back, to her other side. 

Despite their efforts, Mom’s brow was often furrowed. Her exhale had that sharp sound you make after a hard cry. When Dad kissed her and stroked her cheek, tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. 

On Monday, we learned that the governor of California, Jerry Brown, had signed a measure to help terminally ill people end their lives.

Before Mom’s cancer took her down the “difficult road,” my sisters and I had never given assisted dying much thought. If I’d heard about a proposal to give doctors the right to prescribe lethal doses of painkillers to terminally ill patients with less than six months to live, I wouldn’t have opposed it, but I might not have considered it an essential and deeply humane piece of legislation, as I do now. I still recognize the medical and religious reasons many hold for opposing it, but having watched someone I love suffer at the end the way my mother did, I could not in good conscience feel anything but gratitude toward this measure. We don’t know if Mom would have wanted a physician-assisted death if it had been available in our state. But watching her die — knowing that there are so many others out there who suffered longer and without hospice support — made us wish that everyone at least had the option.

One of the great accomplishments of 21st-century medicine is our ability to mitigate and abbreviate pain, to spare patients needless anguish. When we were caring for Mom at home, a hospice nurse brought us a “comfort pack” of medications, which we stored in the refrigerator and used to ease her pain, delirium and anxiety — common symptoms in terminally ill patients. Once she was taken to the hospice facility, the nurses administered these medications under a doctor’s supervision. But because her symptoms were constantly shifting and magnifying, the dosages changed too, and it soon became impossible for my family to distinguish which of Mom’s symptoms were due to the disease process and which were due to side effects of the meds. We agonized over her agony, and I wondered why, if there were medications available to “cure” Mom, to completely eliminate her suffering and transport her with love to her ultimate destination, should she not have the right to that medication if she wanted it? Having watched what she went through, I would certainly want it for myself.

Everyone knows that death is inevitable, but we don’t spend enough time talking about the reality of it. Death doesn’t come like it does in the movies. You don’t always say something profound, close your eyes, and drift away. Death can be protracted, ugly and painful, and we can’t remove grief from the process of dying and letting loved ones go. But surely we can pass laws to give people the option to die without suffering needlessly. 

My older sister and I had the honor of holding Mom’s hand when she finally passed from this world. A wave of grief washed over us, followed by a wave of relief. 

My mom died three weeks ago. She had ovarian cancer. Or what they suspect started as ovarian cancer. By the time the CT scan was finally ordered, the disease had spread throughout her pelvis.

When my friends ask how I’m doing, I say, “I am full of grilief.” Grief for what my mom endured. Relief that it’s finally over. Grilief.

During the 99 days between Mom’s diagnosis and death, she was either undergoing chemotherapy, dealing with the side effects of chemo or seeking ways to relieve her pain. Her hair fell out. She couldn’t eat. She grew weaker and weaker. A tube was placed in her abdomen to drain the fluid. She looked like a cruel science experiment. On her 77th birthday, her doctor told her the chemo had not worked; the cancer had spread. There was nothing more they could do.

That’s when my dad, two sisters and I began caring for her at home. It was easy at first. We helped her sit up, squirted Roxanol under her tongue. “I’m soooooo happy,” she’d say as the drugs kicked in and we tucked her back in bed. 

Baby Bird, we called her.

We thought this was how it would all go down. We’d keep giving her drugs until she died of happiness. But that, we came to learn, is the easy road to death. There is another road, a road euphemistically called “the difficult road.” 

For reasons we may never fully understand, Mom began to suffer from something called terminal agitation, which sounds like something you might experience at an airport when your flight is delayed. But it was nothing like that. 

Mom begged to be put to sleep, then begged for her old life back. She stayed awake for 48 hours straight, talking to herself. She complained that my dad smelled like tomato soup. She told a hospice nurse that we were withholding food from her. She flailed her arms and spouted premonitions about the daughter of a local meteorologist. 

Our mom had been a sweet, well-mannered woman known for countless acts of kindness. This was not our mom. 

We called this person Dark Mom.

The change in Mom’s behavior was shocking and bewildering. And, we later learned, not uncommon. According to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and Hospice Pharmacia, 42 percent of dying patients experience some form of terminal restlessness in the final 48 hours of life. Mom’s agitation lasted five days.

When we could no longer care for her at home, Mom was taken by ambulance to a hospice facility. She insisted she had arrived by airplane. She slung insults, called the nurses “novices.” She tried to hitch her bed sheet to the ceiling fan and climb to freedom. She asked for a gun.

Kimmy, one of the nurses, told me I would miss this phase of Mom’s journey. 

“There is no way,” I told her.

But Kimmy was right. 

By the time the hospice staff got Mom’s agitation under control, she became unresponsive. She lay with her mouth open, gazing into space. Her breath grew shallow, irregular. She ran fevers, her fingertips turned blue, the skin of her face turned orange, then white, then gray. Her left ear lost its familiar shape.

While we waited for Mom to die, my sisters and I whispered to the nurses. “Isn’t there something you can give her to help her along?”

“Everyone asks us that,” they said.

The nurses did everything in their power to make Mom comfortable. They administered her meds, bathed her, swabbed her dry mouth with a tiny blue sponge, and worked in tandem to gently move Mom from her side, to her back, to her other side. 

Despite their efforts, Mom’s brow was often furrowed. Her exhale had that sharp sound you make after a hard cry. When Dad kissed her and stroked her cheek, tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. 

On Monday, we learned that the governor of California, Jerry Brown, had signed a measure to help terminally ill people end their lives.

Before Mom’s cancer took her down the “difficult road,” my sisters and I had never given assisted dying much thought. If I’d heard about a proposal to give doctors the right to prescribe lethal doses of painkillers to terminally ill patients with less than six months to live, I wouldn’t have opposed it, but I might not have considered it an essential and deeply humane piece of legislation, as I do now. I still recognize the medical and religious reasons many hold for opposing it, but having watched someone I love suffer at the end the way my mother did, I could not in good conscience feel anything but gratitude toward this measure. We don’t know if Mom would have wanted a physician-assisted death if it had been available in our state. But watching her die — knowing that there are so many others out there who suffered longer and without hospice support — made us wish that everyone at least had the option.

One of the great accomplishments of 21st-century medicine is our ability to mitigate and abbreviate pain, to spare patients needless anguish. When we were caring for Mom at home, a hospice nurse brought us a “comfort pack” of medications, which we stored in the refrigerator and used to ease her pain, delirium and anxiety — common symptoms in terminally ill patients. Once she was taken to the hospice facility, the nurses administered these medications under a doctor’s supervision. But because her symptoms were constantly shifting and magnifying, the dosages changed too, and it soon became impossible for my family to distinguish which of Mom’s symptoms were due to the disease process and which were due to side effects of the meds. We agonized over her agony, and I wondered why, if there were medications available to “cure” Mom, to completely eliminate her suffering and transport her with love to her ultimate destination, should she not have the right to that medication if she wanted it? Having watched what she went through, I would certainly want it for myself.

Everyone knows that death is inevitable, but we don’t spend enough time talking about the reality of it. Death doesn’t come like it does in the movies. You don’t always say something profound, close your eyes, and drift away. Death can be protracted, ugly and painful, and we can’t remove grief from the process of dying and letting loved ones go. But surely we can pass laws to give people the option to die without suffering needlessly. 

My older sister and I had the honor of holding Mom’s hand when she finally passed from this world. A wave of grief washed over us, followed by a wave of relief. 

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“SNL”’s insane first show: Behind-the-scenes secrets of Chase, Belushi and more, 40 years ago this weekend

"Saturday Night Live" celebrated its 40th anniversary last February with an avalanche of stars parading through a three-hour prime-time special. Overlooked in all the excitement was the fact that the show’s actual 40th anniversary wouldn’t arrive until eight months later — until this Sunday, to be exact. "SNL" premiered on Oct. 11, 1975 (it was actually named "NBC’s Saturday Night" at the time) and it’s startling to compare the shaky, unformed show that almost nobody saw that night to the high-wattage, high-rated season opener we saw last week. We devote a chapter to the first show in our book, "Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live." Here are a few details that illuminate the remarkable distance the show has traveled over the course of those 40 years. Lorne Michaels' scruffy, pot-smoking, disrespectful "enlightened amateurs" It’s odd how many people, including not a few guest hosts, never seem to grasp that "Saturday Night Live" really is, as its name plainly suggests, a live show, a fact that makes it one of the most ambitious, complicated and dangerous programs ever produced. By now SNL has a production schedule that can be described as routine chaos, meaning that, despite a determination to keep things loose and flexible, there are seasoned professionals at the helm who can be relied on to get 90 minutes of comedy on and off the air. Such was not the case going into the premiere. To the contrary, there was no confidence that the first show would come off at all. "SNL" Fearless Leader Lorne Michaels, who was a master at appearing in complete control at every moment, tried to cut the tension in staff meetings by telling his terrified cast and writers to relax. “The worst thing that can happen,” he assured them, “is that none of us will ever work again.” Many of the crew members who worked in Studio 8H and most of the executive hierarchy at NBC thought that was exactly what would happen — and the sooner it happened, the better they’d like it. When Lorne started putting together the show’s cast and writing team during the summer, he’d decreed that no one who’d ever worked in television before would be hired. He was looking for what he called “enlightened amateurs,” meaning talented renegades from the thriving underground comedy scene who were contemptuous of everything network television in those days stood for — a nearly relentless bath of mainstream mush. Lorne’s demands, and the attitude that inspired them, hadn’t gone over especially well with the old-timers in 8H, many of whom had been working there since the days of Milton Berle’s "Texaco Star Theater." They recognized immediately that, whatever “enlightened” was supposed to mean, the amateurs Lorne had hired were just that: amateurs who didn’t have a clue what it took to actually make a television program. Almost as quickly, Lorne realized the show was going to need some seasoned support and backpedaled, but the damage had been done. Thus "SNL" premiered in the midst of hostile territory. The show had managed to get as far as it had mainly because of the support of one man — NBC President Herb Schlosser. Pretty much everyone else in the building had done as little as possible to help the scruffy, pot-smoking, disrespectful troops of "SNL" before the show went on the air, and they couldn’t wait to see them fall flat on their faces when it did. NBC panicked over guest host George Carlin  The guest host for the premiere show was comedian George Carlin, who was chosen, Lorne said in a press release, because “he’s punctual and fills out forms well.” The real reason was that Lorne didn’t want to subject hosts he cared about more, like Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor, to the trauma of a first show — he wasn’t sure, he told us, that he’d be able to “protect” them adequately. Carlin had no idea what he’d signed on for when he arrived and what he saw didn’t make him comfortable. A practitioner of the standup monologue, he found himself booked on a sketch comedy show run by a bunch of neophytes. Partly for that reason and partly because he was, he later admitted, “in another world” on cocaine at the time, Carlin stayed aloof from the proceedings, declining as the week went on the opportunity to appear in any of the sketches he was offered. NBC, for its part, was extremely nervous about having Carlin appear, live, on its airwaves, given that he’d been the focus of a major free-speech battle over his routine about the seven dirty words you can never say on television. Putting the show on a seven-second delay was considered but eventually abandoned. Network executives, however, did demand that Carlin cut his hair and wear a suit. Carlin compromised: he didn’t cut his hair, but he did wear a three-piece suit — with a blue t-shirt rather than a white dress shirt and tie underneath. Billy Crystal's long ride home One of Lorne’s nightmares for the first show was that he’d run out of material 30 minutes before it was supposed to go off the air. In order to make sure that wouldn’t happen, he booked what turned out to be a ridiculous number of guests. Besides Carlin there were three other standups: Billy Crystal, Andy Kaufman and Dan Aykroyd’s longtime comedy partner from Canada, Valri Bromfield, and not one but two musical guests, Janis Ian and Billy Preston (as close as Lorne could get to his original targets, Carole King and Stevie Wonder). During the hour between dress rehearsal and the air show, Lorne realized he’d overcompensated and told Crystal and Bromfield they’d have to drastically cut their routines. Crystal’s manager, Buddy Morra, vehemently resisted, and for once Lorne lost his temper, ending up in a shouting match with Morra in a hallway outside 8H. Morra insisted that if Lorne didn’t relent he and Crystal were walking. Lorne didn’t, and they did. Instead of making his network TV debut, Crystal soon found himself riding a train home to Long Island, his face pressed against the window, wondering how things could have gone so wrong. The disastrous run-through The first full run-through of the premiere show, on Friday night, October 10, didn’t go well. Somebody forgot to make sure that there was an audience in Studio 8H, and at the last minute, pages from NBC’s Guest Relations staff were outside 30 Rock, pulling in any warm bodies they could find. Thus a fair number of those who witnessed SNL’s first full rehearsal were homeless people taking the opportunity to spend 90 minutes off the street. They got more than they bargained for: the rehearsal ran at least twice the show’s allotted 90 minutes and, thanks to a sound system that hadn’t been significantly upgraded for decades — certainly not to the standards needed for both sketch comedy and rock and roll — few people in the audience could hear what was being said onstage anyway. NBC’s vice president in charge of late-night programming, Dick Ebersol, who had hired Lorne and helped run interference for him within NBC, managed at 2 a.m. to find an outfit called Hollywood Sound that was in the process of breaking down the sound system they’d used that night for a concert at Madison Square Garden. With the help of a generous disbursement of network dollars, Ebersol convinced them to truck their equipment over to 30 Rock, where they worked all night setting it up for the premiere. They worked alongside the stagehands, who with set designers Eugene Lee and Leo Yoshimura were frantically trying to finish home base — the main set. Lee had stubbornly insisted, for authenticity’s sake, on using real 8 x 8-inch facing bricks for the floor, instead of the more conventional contact paper or paint. The bricks weighed half a pound apiece and had to be cut to fit. The carpenters at the Brooklyn set shop had refused to build the bricks into the set, saying they’d break when they were trucked to Manhattan. Instead, the bricks arrived at 30 Rock in a crate along with a single carbide saw blade. To Yoshimura, the message was clear: “Cut them yourself, asshole.” Yoshimura was still finishing the set a half an hour before show time. Every few minutes Dick Ebersol would run up to him to ask, “Are you gonna get done? Are you gonna get it done?” Yoshimura, who at that point had been without sleep for several days, shrugged and said, “I don’t know Dick. If I don’t, you can fire me.” John Belushi almost didn't go on John Belushi was at the center of another drama that unfolded just before air time. Like all the cast members, Belushi had been insulted by the salaries the network had offered the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, for good reason. NBC was demanding that the performers commit themselves to the network for an absurd length of time — five years — for an even more absurd amount of money – $750 a show in the first season. Take it or leave it. For much longer than the other cast members, Belushi kept insisting he wasn’t going to take it, and by 11 o’clock the night of the premiere he was still refusing to affix his signature to the deal. With ever-growing desperation — Belushi was one of two characters in the show’s opening sketch, and he wouldn’t be able to go on without a contract — Ebersol kept begging him to sign, but Belushi was having none of it. Finally he spotted Lorne’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, who was standing nearby, and waved him over. “This guy is telling me this is favored nations,” he said to Brillstein, referring to a common clause in ensemble show contracts that ensures every cast member is paid the same. “The only way I’ll sign,” Belushi continued, “is if you tell me it’s fair, and I’ll only sign if you represent me.” Brillstein shrugged and said fine, and Belushi took Ebersol’s pen and signed. Crazy John Belushi, Brillstein would later reflect. He conned himself right into a deal with the boss’s manager. Crazy like a fox. (Like most show-biz contracts, the initial one Belushi and the other cast members signed turned out to be negotiable. As their stardom increased, so did their salaries, in both cases precipitously.) And it wasn't even an immediate hit The first show did come off without any disasters, although afterward it disappeared more or less soundlessly into the late night void. Contrary to popular belief, "SNL" wasn’t an overnight success — far from it. Ratings for most of the first season were unimpressive. It stayed on the air partly because it had strong support from young newspaper critics and partly because it seemed to be building an audience among young viewers, including the teenaged children of many of NBC’s top executives, who were begging their fathers to get them tickets to the show. (One of those influential offspring was Herb Schlosser’s son Eric, who attended the show often and who later became the author of the best-selling exposé, "Fast Food Nation.") "SNL" didn’t qualify as a genuine hit until its third season. One viewer on Oct. 11, 1975, got the joke immediately, however. Steve Martin had watched the premiere in Aspen, Colorado, and remembers not laughing so much as looking on in wonder. “Fuck,” he said to himself as the credits rolled. “They did it. They did the show everyone should have been doing.""Saturday Night Live" celebrated its 40th anniversary last February with an avalanche of stars parading through a three-hour prime-time special. Overlooked in all the excitement was the fact that the show’s actual 40th anniversary wouldn’t arrive until eight months later — until this Sunday, to be exact. "SNL" premiered on Oct. 11, 1975 (it was actually named "NBC’s Saturday Night" at the time) and it’s startling to compare the shaky, unformed show that almost nobody saw that night to the high-wattage, high-rated season opener we saw last week. We devote a chapter to the first show in our book, "Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live." Here are a few details that illuminate the remarkable distance the show has traveled over the course of those 40 years. Lorne Michaels' scruffy, pot-smoking, disrespectful "enlightened amateurs" It’s odd how many people, including not a few guest hosts, never seem to grasp that "Saturday Night Live" really is, as its name plainly suggests, a live show, a fact that makes it one of the most ambitious, complicated and dangerous programs ever produced. By now SNL has a production schedule that can be described as routine chaos, meaning that, despite a determination to keep things loose and flexible, there are seasoned professionals at the helm who can be relied on to get 90 minutes of comedy on and off the air. Such was not the case going into the premiere. To the contrary, there was no confidence that the first show would come off at all. "SNL" Fearless Leader Lorne Michaels, who was a master at appearing in complete control at every moment, tried to cut the tension in staff meetings by telling his terrified cast and writers to relax. “The worst thing that can happen,” he assured them, “is that none of us will ever work again.” Many of the crew members who worked in Studio 8H and most of the executive hierarchy at NBC thought that was exactly what would happen — and the sooner it happened, the better they’d like it. When Lorne started putting together the show’s cast and writing team during the summer, he’d decreed that no one who’d ever worked in television before would be hired. He was looking for what he called “enlightened amateurs,” meaning talented renegades from the thriving underground comedy scene who were contemptuous of everything network television in those days stood for — a nearly relentless bath of mainstream mush. Lorne’s demands, and the attitude that inspired them, hadn’t gone over especially well with the old-timers in 8H, many of whom had been working there since the days of Milton Berle’s "Texaco Star Theater." They recognized immediately that, whatever “enlightened” was supposed to mean, the amateurs Lorne had hired were just that: amateurs who didn’t have a clue what it took to actually make a television program. Almost as quickly, Lorne realized the show was going to need some seasoned support and backpedaled, but the damage had been done. Thus "SNL" premiered in the midst of hostile territory. The show had managed to get as far as it had mainly because of the support of one man — NBC President Herb Schlosser. Pretty much everyone else in the building had done as little as possible to help the scruffy, pot-smoking, disrespectful troops of "SNL" before the show went on the air, and they couldn’t wait to see them fall flat on their faces when it did. NBC panicked over guest host George Carlin  The guest host for the premiere show was comedian George Carlin, who was chosen, Lorne said in a press release, because “he’s punctual and fills out forms well.” The real reason was that Lorne didn’t want to subject hosts he cared about more, like Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor, to the trauma of a first show — he wasn’t sure, he told us, that he’d be able to “protect” them adequately. Carlin had no idea what he’d signed on for when he arrived and what he saw didn’t make him comfortable. A practitioner of the standup monologue, he found himself booked on a sketch comedy show run by a bunch of neophytes. Partly for that reason and partly because he was, he later admitted, “in another world” on cocaine at the time, Carlin stayed aloof from the proceedings, declining as the week went on the opportunity to appear in any of the sketches he was offered. NBC, for its part, was extremely nervous about having Carlin appear, live, on its airwaves, given that he’d been the focus of a major free-speech battle over his routine about the seven dirty words you can never say on television. Putting the show on a seven-second delay was considered but eventually abandoned. Network executives, however, did demand that Carlin cut his hair and wear a suit. Carlin compromised: he didn’t cut his hair, but he did wear a three-piece suit — with a blue t-shirt rather than a white dress shirt and tie underneath. Billy Crystal's long ride home One of Lorne’s nightmares for the first show was that he’d run out of material 30 minutes before it was supposed to go off the air. In order to make sure that wouldn’t happen, he booked what turned out to be a ridiculous number of guests. Besides Carlin there were three other standups: Billy Crystal, Andy Kaufman and Dan Aykroyd’s longtime comedy partner from Canada, Valri Bromfield, and not one but two musical guests, Janis Ian and Billy Preston (as close as Lorne could get to his original targets, Carole King and Stevie Wonder). During the hour between dress rehearsal and the air show, Lorne realized he’d overcompensated and told Crystal and Bromfield they’d have to drastically cut their routines. Crystal’s manager, Buddy Morra, vehemently resisted, and for once Lorne lost his temper, ending up in a shouting match with Morra in a hallway outside 8H. Morra insisted that if Lorne didn’t relent he and Crystal were walking. Lorne didn’t, and they did. Instead of making his network TV debut, Crystal soon found himself riding a train home to Long Island, his face pressed against the window, wondering how things could have gone so wrong. The disastrous run-through The first full run-through of the premiere show, on Friday night, October 10, didn’t go well. Somebody forgot to make sure that there was an audience in Studio 8H, and at the last minute, pages from NBC’s Guest Relations staff were outside 30 Rock, pulling in any warm bodies they could find. Thus a fair number of those who witnessed SNL’s first full rehearsal were homeless people taking the opportunity to spend 90 minutes off the street. They got more than they bargained for: the rehearsal ran at least twice the show’s allotted 90 minutes and, thanks to a sound system that hadn’t been significantly upgraded for decades — certainly not to the standards needed for both sketch comedy and rock and roll — few people in the audience could hear what was being said onstage anyway. NBC’s vice president in charge of late-night programming, Dick Ebersol, who had hired Lorne and helped run interference for him within NBC, managed at 2 a.m. to find an outfit called Hollywood Sound that was in the process of breaking down the sound system they’d used that night for a concert at Madison Square Garden. With the help of a generous disbursement of network dollars, Ebersol convinced them to truck their equipment over to 30 Rock, where they worked all night setting it up for the premiere. They worked alongside the stagehands, who with set designers Eugene Lee and Leo Yoshimura were frantically trying to finish home base — the main set. Lee had stubbornly insisted, for authenticity’s sake, on using real 8 x 8-inch facing bricks for the floor, instead of the more conventional contact paper or paint. The bricks weighed half a pound apiece and had to be cut to fit. The carpenters at the Brooklyn set shop had refused to build the bricks into the set, saying they’d break when they were trucked to Manhattan. Instead, the bricks arrived at 30 Rock in a crate along with a single carbide saw blade. To Yoshimura, the message was clear: “Cut them yourself, asshole.” Yoshimura was still finishing the set a half an hour before show time. Every few minutes Dick Ebersol would run up to him to ask, “Are you gonna get done? Are you gonna get it done?” Yoshimura, who at that point had been without sleep for several days, shrugged and said, “I don’t know Dick. If I don’t, you can fire me.” John Belushi almost didn't go on John Belushi was at the center of another drama that unfolded just before air time. Like all the cast members, Belushi had been insulted by the salaries the network had offered the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, for good reason. NBC was demanding that the performers commit themselves to the network for an absurd length of time — five years — for an even more absurd amount of money – $750 a show in the first season. Take it or leave it. For much longer than the other cast members, Belushi kept insisting he wasn’t going to take it, and by 11 o’clock the night of the premiere he was still refusing to affix his signature to the deal. With ever-growing desperation — Belushi was one of two characters in the show’s opening sketch, and he wouldn’t be able to go on without a contract — Ebersol kept begging him to sign, but Belushi was having none of it. Finally he spotted Lorne’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, who was standing nearby, and waved him over. “This guy is telling me this is favored nations,” he said to Brillstein, referring to a common clause in ensemble show contracts that ensures every cast member is paid the same. “The only way I’ll sign,” Belushi continued, “is if you tell me it’s fair, and I’ll only sign if you represent me.” Brillstein shrugged and said fine, and Belushi took Ebersol’s pen and signed. Crazy John Belushi, Brillstein would later reflect. He conned himself right into a deal with the boss’s manager. Crazy like a fox. (Like most show-biz contracts, the initial one Belushi and the other cast members signed turned out to be negotiable. As their stardom increased, so did their salaries, in both cases precipitously.) And it wasn't even an immediate hit The first show did come off without any disasters, although afterward it disappeared more or less soundlessly into the late night void. Contrary to popular belief, "SNL" wasn’t an overnight success — far from it. Ratings for most of the first season were unimpressive. It stayed on the air partly because it had strong support from young newspaper critics and partly because it seemed to be building an audience among young viewers, including the teenaged children of many of NBC’s top executives, who were begging their fathers to get them tickets to the show. (One of those influential offspring was Herb Schlosser’s son Eric, who attended the show often and who later became the author of the best-selling exposé, "Fast Food Nation.") "SNL" didn’t qualify as a genuine hit until its third season. One viewer on Oct. 11, 1975, got the joke immediately, however. Steve Martin had watched the premiere in Aspen, Colorado, and remembers not laughing so much as looking on in wonder. “Fuck,” he said to himself as the credits rolled. “They did it. They did the show everyone should have been doing."

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“An emotional Benjamin Buttoning”: The inside secrets of 6 new books that will top your fall reading list

For September, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to six authors with new books: Ryan Britt ("Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: And Other Geeky Truths," Nov. 24), Susan Cheever ("Drinking in America: Our Secret History," Oct. 13), Ron Childress ("And West Is West," Oct. 13), Josh Gondelman (co-author with Joe Berkowitz of "You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You've Already Ruined Your Life," out today), Maris Kreizman ("Slaughterhouse 90210," out today) and John Seabrook ("The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory," out now). Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about? GONDELMAN: It's basically "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" but nonfiction, and for grownups. Is that too much summary? If so, it's about the feeling of remembering something embarrassing you said ten years ago and thinking about it all day. CHILDRESS: Ethan Winter and Jessica Aldridge, a Wall Street quant and a military drone pilot, respectively. Bit players caught in a nexus of secrets, technology failures, identity loss and family crises. Also, it's about America’s transitional state between a society managed and run by people to one controlled by algorithms and mediated through screens. SEABROOK: It's probably as close as I am ever going to come to satisfying my true ambition, which is to write a musical. People talk for a while, and then there's a song. BRITT: My book is an attempt to replicate on the page what it's like to talk to me in real life when I'm conflating weird opinions about science fiction with random personal anecdotes. CHEEVER: It’s about a new way of writing history using the vivid details of actual lives to show how past events unfolded. I have tried to take the pictures of our forefathers off the wall and let them dance. KREIZMAN: "Slaughterhouse 90210" is about how books intersect with TV and film, how loving books and loving pop culture go together. They’re not mutually exclusive enjoyments, and at best they enhance each other. Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book? CHILDRESS: Current news. The Internet. Military blogs. Stock market flash crashes. Enhanced security. The acceptance of mass surveillance. Diminished expectations. The possibility of resistance. BRITT: There's a fictional character who is name-checked in the title of the book whom you maybe have heard of. Gin and tonics were probably an influence. The older brother from the band Oasis — Noel Gallagher — has probably influenced all my nonfiction. Not necessarily his music. But his interviews. I am not kidding. SEABROOK: My parents were a major influence on this book, because they both loved the pop songs of their day (Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra) and played them around the house — my mother on the piano, my father on the record player. And I noticed that whenever music was playing in the house, everyone seemed happier. The furniture seemed to float a millimeter or so off the floor. I wanted to recapture that happy feeling in the book. CHEEVER: Many of the historians we revere in this country write with a kind of sleepy gravitas, a soft-focus lens that leaves out all the interesting things — sex, food, clothes and especially drinking. I looked for the exceptions. KREIZMAN: US Weekly, TV recaps, cartoons, fan fiction, pop music, that feeling of accomplishment and mortification after a particularly long period of binge-watching or binge-reading. GONDELMAN: Our book is influenced enormously by Freudian slips, chemistry-free first kisses and botched job interviews. Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book? SEABROOK: The Boy calls shotgun, reprograms the radio presets to pop stations, Kesha's barbaric yawp enters my life, WTF IS this shit? "You spin my head right round" ... Thumpa thooka whompa whomp Pish pish pish Thumpa wompah wompah pah pah Maaakaka thomp peep bap boony Gunga gunga gung GONDELMAN: The opposite of what was happening in the book. An emotional Benjamin Buttoning, if you will. CHEEVER: Same old, same old. BRITT: Travel. What-am-I-doing-with-my-life-is-this-really-where-I-want-to-be. Also: New York nonsense. KREIZMAN: Abject self-doubt; attempting to watch and read everything all at once in big deep gulps and wishing I could pour books directly into my brain; working on my night cheese. CHILDRESS: This and that. Reading. Travel. Exercise. Netflix. Art openings. Housekeeping. Database projects. Motorcycle rides. Audiobooks. What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers? CHEEVER: The words that hurt are often code words for the writer being feminine. Paul Muldoon called me “soppy … sloppy and sentimental,” after my last book, a biography of E.E. Cummings. Would he have said that about a man? There are many examples of this. KREIZMAN: "Wake up, sheeple." CHILDRESS: I’m concerned that my work may be pigeonholed in the thriller category because of the pacing ... but I do like a story that keeps moving. BRITT: My book comes out in November, so I'm in that stage where everyone is giving me tons of thumbs-up and winks and smiles. I will say this: despite the word "geeky" being in the subtitle, I try to be very careful about how I use that word. GONDELMAN: I've tried not to read reviews, but sometimes things come across my social media feed. My least favorite is any synonym for funny that's not "funny": Knee-slapping, rib-tickling, anything about the reader's "funny bone." So often, when people talk about comedy, they revert to the language people used to review the Marx Brothers. I imagine "garbage," "seizure-inducing," and "nauseous" would sting too. SEABROOK: "Brilliant."  Such a cliche. "Deeply felt." Gag me with a spoon. "Best thing I've ever read." Bullshit! If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be? GONDELMAN: In a dream world, I would love to be a master pastry chef, because it combines something I love doing (baking) with something I'm not good at doing (baking). BUT! Practically, if I weren't writing and doing comedy things, I'd like to teach kids to read. I would be good at that in real life. CHEEVER: I don’t really think of writing as a career. It’s something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it. CHILDRESS: Computer programmer. As a coder, like a writer, you sit in a room and type, solving small problems as they arise while developing a more comprehensive overall goal that is similar to a narrative. SEABROOK: My high school aptitude test said I would make a good hospital administrator. There are a lot of sick people out there who should be very glad I didn't follow that suggestion. BRITT: I wish I'd become a paleontologist, because I love dinosaurs. But I think I realized at a young age that those folks are outside a lot and I really can't handle getting sunburned. KREIZMAN: I would be The Rock's dog walker. What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at? KREIZMAN: I am pretty great at juxtaposition, less great at subtle yet effective self-promotion (self-promo is one of the foremost elements of craft, right?). BRITT: I'm decent with weird and quirky analogies. I'm bad at patience. I like jumping to conclusions without explaining myself and praying that my weird analogy will confuse you long enough to get on-board my crazy space-train. CHEEVER: All writers have strengths and weaknesses. I am terrified of being boring, so I write short, compressed stories that sometimes don’t give a reader time to think about what they have read. I struggle to slow down. SEABROOK: I'm pretty good at the Shaker chair-building part of it. Simple woodworking that you can sit on and not hurt your butt or worry about the back giving way. I'm terrible at imagining things that didn't happen — which is why I stopped writing fiction at the age of 23. CHILDRESS: I’m good at editing myself down. I dislike using too many words and am suspicious of clever phrases that can seduce. This may not always be a good thing. I wish that I wrote faster, probably so that I could cut more. GONDELMAN: I tend to be better at describing feelings and ideas, and worse at painting a picture of any physical thing. I have terrible spatial reasoning skills so even if I were describing my girlfriend, whom I see every day, it sound like I was talking about a child's drawing of her. "Very beautiful. Glasses. Brown hair. Super smart brain. Bigger than our dog. Smaller than me." How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything? BRITT: I just think about singer-songwriters, or actors who write their own scripts, and I figure, well, it could be worse! CHILDRESS: I don’t think about anyone reading what I’m writing when I’m writing. I’m enjoying the writing process — the exploration of ideas, the solving of compositional problems — as an end in itself. I hope that’s not hubris. SEABROOK: With large dollops of bitter experience. I started out assuming people would automatically be interested in things that interested me, only to be shocked — shocked! — to discover they were often not. So with "The Song Machine" I set out to write about the most popular cultural artifacts in the world — pop songs. Not sure if people who like pop songs read, or if people who read like pop songs. I guess we're about to find out. And hey, the audio book is amazing! GONDELMAN: It makes me happy to smash words together. So it's nice when I can be met with warmth and enthusiasm, but doing standup comedy has taught me how to push through the fact that statistically speaking, 100% of Earth's population population doesn't have any interest in what I'm doing at all. I try to think less about having/deserving an audience and focus on enjoying the privilege of creating things I like. CHEEVER: It’s certainly hubris, but it’s the same hubris that makes me a teacher, a useful friend, a good mother for that matter. I hope that when readers look up from the last page of my book they will see the world in a new way. It would be hubris to think that happens automatically; I think it’s humility to hope that it might someday. KREIZMAN: I look at Twitter and how everyone I know is constantly spouting opinions about anything and everything and I think, Why not me?For September, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to six authors with new books: Ryan Britt ("Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: And Other Geeky Truths," Nov. 24), Susan Cheever ("Drinking in America: Our Secret History," Oct. 13), Ron Childress ("And West Is West," Oct. 13), Josh Gondelman (co-author with Joe Berkowitz of "You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You've Already Ruined Your Life," out today), Maris Kreizman ("Slaughterhouse 90210," out today) and John Seabrook ("The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory," out now). Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about? GONDELMAN: It's basically "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" but nonfiction, and for grownups. Is that too much summary? If so, it's about the feeling of remembering something embarrassing you said ten years ago and thinking about it all day. CHILDRESS: Ethan Winter and Jessica Aldridge, a Wall Street quant and a military drone pilot, respectively. Bit players caught in a nexus of secrets, technology failures, identity loss and family crises. Also, it's about America’s transitional state between a society managed and run by people to one controlled by algorithms and mediated through screens. SEABROOK: It's probably as close as I am ever going to come to satisfying my true ambition, which is to write a musical. People talk for a while, and then there's a song. BRITT: My book is an attempt to replicate on the page what it's like to talk to me in real life when I'm conflating weird opinions about science fiction with random personal anecdotes. CHEEVER: It’s about a new way of writing history using the vivid details of actual lives to show how past events unfolded. I have tried to take the pictures of our forefathers off the wall and let them dance. KREIZMAN: "Slaughterhouse 90210" is about how books intersect with TV and film, how loving books and loving pop culture go together. They’re not mutually exclusive enjoyments, and at best they enhance each other. Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book? CHILDRESS: Current news. The Internet. Military blogs. Stock market flash crashes. Enhanced security. The acceptance of mass surveillance. Diminished expectations. The possibility of resistance. BRITT: There's a fictional character who is name-checked in the title of the book whom you maybe have heard of. Gin and tonics were probably an influence. The older brother from the band Oasis — Noel Gallagher — has probably influenced all my nonfiction. Not necessarily his music. But his interviews. I am not kidding. SEABROOK: My parents were a major influence on this book, because they both loved the pop songs of their day (Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra) and played them around the house — my mother on the piano, my father on the record player. And I noticed that whenever music was playing in the house, everyone seemed happier. The furniture seemed to float a millimeter or so off the floor. I wanted to recapture that happy feeling in the book. CHEEVER: Many of the historians we revere in this country write with a kind of sleepy gravitas, a soft-focus lens that leaves out all the interesting things — sex, food, clothes and especially drinking. I looked for the exceptions. KREIZMAN: US Weekly, TV recaps, cartoons, fan fiction, pop music, that feeling of accomplishment and mortification after a particularly long period of binge-watching or binge-reading. GONDELMAN: Our book is influenced enormously by Freudian slips, chemistry-free first kisses and botched job interviews. Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book? SEABROOK: The Boy calls shotgun, reprograms the radio presets to pop stations, Kesha's barbaric yawp enters my life, WTF IS this shit? "You spin my head right round" ... Thumpa thooka whompa whomp Pish pish pish Thumpa wompah wompah pah pah Maaakaka thomp peep bap boony Gunga gunga gung GONDELMAN: The opposite of what was happening in the book. An emotional Benjamin Buttoning, if you will. CHEEVER: Same old, same old. BRITT: Travel. What-am-I-doing-with-my-life-is-this-really-where-I-want-to-be. Also: New York nonsense. KREIZMAN: Abject self-doubt; attempting to watch and read everything all at once in big deep gulps and wishing I could pour books directly into my brain; working on my night cheese. CHILDRESS: This and that. Reading. Travel. Exercise. Netflix. Art openings. Housekeeping. Database projects. Motorcycle rides. Audiobooks. What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers? CHEEVER: The words that hurt are often code words for the writer being feminine. Paul Muldoon called me “soppy … sloppy and sentimental,” after my last book, a biography of E.E. Cummings. Would he have said that about a man? There are many examples of this. KREIZMAN: "Wake up, sheeple." CHILDRESS: I’m concerned that my work may be pigeonholed in the thriller category because of the pacing ... but I do like a story that keeps moving. BRITT: My book comes out in November, so I'm in that stage where everyone is giving me tons of thumbs-up and winks and smiles. I will say this: despite the word "geeky" being in the subtitle, I try to be very careful about how I use that word. GONDELMAN: I've tried not to read reviews, but sometimes things come across my social media feed. My least favorite is any synonym for funny that's not "funny": Knee-slapping, rib-tickling, anything about the reader's "funny bone." So often, when people talk about comedy, they revert to the language people used to review the Marx Brothers. I imagine "garbage," "seizure-inducing," and "nauseous" would sting too. SEABROOK: "Brilliant."  Such a cliche. "Deeply felt." Gag me with a spoon. "Best thing I've ever read." Bullshit! If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be? GONDELMAN: In a dream world, I would love to be a master pastry chef, because it combines something I love doing (baking) with something I'm not good at doing (baking). BUT! Practically, if I weren't writing and doing comedy things, I'd like to teach kids to read. I would be good at that in real life. CHEEVER: I don’t really think of writing as a career. It’s something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it. CHILDRESS: Computer programmer. As a coder, like a writer, you sit in a room and type, solving small problems as they arise while developing a more comprehensive overall goal that is similar to a narrative. SEABROOK: My high school aptitude test said I would make a good hospital administrator. There are a lot of sick people out there who should be very glad I didn't follow that suggestion. BRITT: I wish I'd become a paleontologist, because I love dinosaurs. But I think I realized at a young age that those folks are outside a lot and I really can't handle getting sunburned. KREIZMAN: I would be The Rock's dog walker. What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at? KREIZMAN: I am pretty great at juxtaposition, less great at subtle yet effective self-promotion (self-promo is one of the foremost elements of craft, right?). BRITT: I'm decent with weird and quirky analogies. I'm bad at patience. I like jumping to conclusions without explaining myself and praying that my weird analogy will confuse you long enough to get on-board my crazy space-train. CHEEVER: All writers have strengths and weaknesses. I am terrified of being boring, so I write short, compressed stories that sometimes don’t give a reader time to think about what they have read. I struggle to slow down. SEABROOK: I'm pretty good at the Shaker chair-building part of it. Simple woodworking that you can sit on and not hurt your butt or worry about the back giving way. I'm terrible at imagining things that didn't happen — which is why I stopped writing fiction at the age of 23. CHILDRESS: I’m good at editing myself down. I dislike using too many words and am suspicious of clever phrases that can seduce. This may not always be a good thing. I wish that I wrote faster, probably so that I could cut more. GONDELMAN: I tend to be better at describing feelings and ideas, and worse at painting a picture of any physical thing. I have terrible spatial reasoning skills so even if I were describing my girlfriend, whom I see every day, it sound like I was talking about a child's drawing of her. "Very beautiful. Glasses. Brown hair. Super smart brain. Bigger than our dog. Smaller than me." How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything? BRITT: I just think about singer-songwriters, or actors who write their own scripts, and I figure, well, it could be worse! CHILDRESS: I don’t think about anyone reading what I’m writing when I’m writing. I’m enjoying the writing process — the exploration of ideas, the solving of compositional problems — as an end in itself. I hope that’s not hubris. SEABROOK: With large dollops of bitter experience. I started out assuming people would automatically be interested in things that interested me, only to be shocked — shocked! — to discover they were often not. So with "The Song Machine" I set out to write about the most popular cultural artifacts in the world — pop songs. Not sure if people who like pop songs read, or if people who read like pop songs. I guess we're about to find out. And hey, the audio book is amazing! GONDELMAN: It makes me happy to smash words together. So it's nice when I can be met with warmth and enthusiasm, but doing standup comedy has taught me how to push through the fact that statistically speaking, 100% of Earth's population population doesn't have any interest in what I'm doing at all. I try to think less about having/deserving an audience and focus on enjoying the privilege of creating things I like. CHEEVER: It’s certainly hubris, but it’s the same hubris that makes me a teacher, a useful friend, a good mother for that matter. I hope that when readers look up from the last page of my book they will see the world in a new way. It would be hubris to think that happens automatically; I think it’s humility to hope that it might someday. KREIZMAN: I look at Twitter and how everyone I know is constantly spouting opinions about anything and everything and I think, Why not me?For September, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to six authors with new books: Ryan Britt ("Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: And Other Geeky Truths," Nov. 24), Susan Cheever ("Drinking in America: Our Secret History," Oct. 13), Ron Childress ("And West Is West," Oct. 13), Josh Gondelman (co-author with Joe Berkowitz of "You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You've Already Ruined Your Life," out today), Maris Kreizman ("Slaughterhouse 90210," out today) and John Seabrook ("The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory," out now). Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about? GONDELMAN: It's basically "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" but nonfiction, and for grownups. Is that too much summary? If so, it's about the feeling of remembering something embarrassing you said ten years ago and thinking about it all day. CHILDRESS: Ethan Winter and Jessica Aldridge, a Wall Street quant and a military drone pilot, respectively. Bit players caught in a nexus of secrets, technology failures, identity loss and family crises. Also, it's about America’s transitional state between a society managed and run by people to one controlled by algorithms and mediated through screens. SEABROOK: It's probably as close as I am ever going to come to satisfying my true ambition, which is to write a musical. People talk for a while, and then there's a song. BRITT: My book is an attempt to replicate on the page what it's like to talk to me in real life when I'm conflating weird opinions about science fiction with random personal anecdotes. CHEEVER: It’s about a new way of writing history using the vivid details of actual lives to show how past events unfolded. I have tried to take the pictures of our forefathers off the wall and let them dance. KREIZMAN: "Slaughterhouse 90210" is about how books intersect with TV and film, how loving books and loving pop culture go together. They’re not mutually exclusive enjoyments, and at best they enhance each other. Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book? CHILDRESS: Current news. The Internet. Military blogs. Stock market flash crashes. Enhanced security. The acceptance of mass surveillance. Diminished expectations. The possibility of resistance. BRITT: There's a fictional character who is name-checked in the title of the book whom you maybe have heard of. Gin and tonics were probably an influence. The older brother from the band Oasis — Noel Gallagher — has probably influenced all my nonfiction. Not necessarily his music. But his interviews. I am not kidding. SEABROOK: My parents were a major influence on this book, because they both loved the pop songs of their day (Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra) and played them around the house — my mother on the piano, my father on the record player. And I noticed that whenever music was playing in the house, everyone seemed happier. The furniture seemed to float a millimeter or so off the floor. I wanted to recapture that happy feeling in the book. CHEEVER: Many of the historians we revere in this country write with a kind of sleepy gravitas, a soft-focus lens that leaves out all the interesting things — sex, food, clothes and especially drinking. I looked for the exceptions. KREIZMAN: US Weekly, TV recaps, cartoons, fan fiction, pop music, that feeling of accomplishment and mortification after a particularly long period of binge-watching or binge-reading. GONDELMAN: Our book is influenced enormously by Freudian slips, chemistry-free first kisses and botched job interviews. Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book? SEABROOK: The Boy calls shotgun, reprograms the radio presets to pop stations, Kesha's barbaric yawp enters my life, WTF IS this shit? "You spin my head right round" ... Thumpa thooka whompa whomp Pish pish pish Thumpa wompah wompah pah pah Maaakaka thomp peep bap boony Gunga gunga gung GONDELMAN: The opposite of what was happening in the book. An emotional Benjamin Buttoning, if you will. CHEEVER: Same old, same old. BRITT: Travel. What-am-I-doing-with-my-life-is-this-really-where-I-want-to-be. Also: New York nonsense. KREIZMAN: Abject self-doubt; attempting to watch and read everything all at once in big deep gulps and wishing I could pour books directly into my brain; working on my night cheese. CHILDRESS: This and that. Reading. Travel. Exercise. Netflix. Art openings. Housekeeping. Database projects. Motorcycle rides. Audiobooks. What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers? CHEEVER: The words that hurt are often code words for the writer being feminine. Paul Muldoon called me “soppy … sloppy and sentimental,” after my last book, a biography of E.E. Cummings. Would he have said that about a man? There are many examples of this. KREIZMAN: "Wake up, sheeple." CHILDRESS: I’m concerned that my work may be pigeonholed in the thriller category because of the pacing ... but I do like a story that keeps moving. BRITT: My book comes out in November, so I'm in that stage where everyone is giving me tons of thumbs-up and winks and smiles. I will say this: despite the word "geeky" being in the subtitle, I try to be very careful about how I use that word. GONDELMAN: I've tried not to read reviews, but sometimes things come across my social media feed. My least favorite is any synonym for funny that's not "funny": Knee-slapping, rib-tickling, anything about the reader's "funny bone." So often, when people talk about comedy, they revert to the language people used to review the Marx Brothers. I imagine "garbage," "seizure-inducing," and "nauseous" would sting too. SEABROOK: "Brilliant."  Such a cliche. "Deeply felt." Gag me with a spoon. "Best thing I've ever read." Bullshit! If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be? GONDELMAN: In a dream world, I would love to be a master pastry chef, because it combines something I love doing (baking) with something I'm not good at doing (baking). BUT! Practically, if I weren't writing and doing comedy things, I'd like to teach kids to read. I would be good at that in real life. CHEEVER: I don’t really think of writing as a career. It’s something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it. CHILDRESS: Computer programmer. As a coder, like a writer, you sit in a room and type, solving small problems as they arise while developing a more comprehensive overall goal that is similar to a narrative. SEABROOK: My high school aptitude test said I would make a good hospital administrator. There are a lot of sick people out there who should be very glad I didn't follow that suggestion. BRITT: I wish I'd become a paleontologist, because I love dinosaurs. But I think I realized at a young age that those folks are outside a lot and I really can't handle getting sunburned. KREIZMAN: I would be The Rock's dog walker. What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at? KREIZMAN: I am pretty great at juxtaposition, less great at subtle yet effective self-promotion (self-promo is one of the foremost elements of craft, right?). BRITT: I'm decent with weird and quirky analogies. I'm bad at patience. I like jumping to conclusions without explaining myself and praying that my weird analogy will confuse you long enough to get on-board my crazy space-train. CHEEVER: All writers have strengths and weaknesses. I am terrified of being boring, so I write short, compressed stories that sometimes don’t give a reader time to think about what they have read. I struggle to slow down. SEABROOK: I'm pretty good at the Shaker chair-building part of it. Simple woodworking that you can sit on and not hurt your butt or worry about the back giving way. I'm terrible at imagining things that didn't happen — which is why I stopped writing fiction at the age of 23. CHILDRESS: I’m good at editing myself down. I dislike using too many words and am suspicious of clever phrases that can seduce. This may not always be a good thing. I wish that I wrote faster, probably so that I could cut more. GONDELMAN: I tend to be better at describing feelings and ideas, and worse at painting a picture of any physical thing. I have terrible spatial reasoning skills so even if I were describing my girlfriend, whom I see every day, it sound like I was talking about a child's drawing of her. "Very beautiful. Glasses. Brown hair. Super smart brain. Bigger than our dog. Smaller than me." How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything? BRITT: I just think about singer-songwriters, or actors who write their own scripts, and I figure, well, it could be worse! CHILDRESS: I don’t think about anyone reading what I’m writing when I’m writing. I’m enjoying the writing process — the exploration of ideas, the solving of compositional problems — as an end in itself. I hope that’s not hubris. SEABROOK: With large dollops of bitter experience. I started out assuming people would automatically be interested in things that interested me, only to be shocked — shocked! — to discover they were often not. So with "The Song Machine" I set out to write about the most popular cultural artifacts in the world — pop songs. Not sure if people who like pop songs read, or if people who read like pop songs. I guess we're about to find out. And hey, the audio book is amazing! GONDELMAN: It makes me happy to smash words together. So it's nice when I can be met with warmth and enthusiasm, but doing standup comedy has taught me how to push through the fact that statistically speaking, 100% of Earth's population population doesn't have any interest in what I'm doing at all. I try to think less about having/deserving an audience and focus on enjoying the privilege of creating things I like. CHEEVER: It’s certainly hubris, but it’s the same hubris that makes me a teacher, a useful friend, a good mother for that matter. I hope that when readers look up from the last page of my book they will see the world in a new way. It would be hubris to think that happens automatically; I think it’s humility to hope that it might someday. KREIZMAN: I look at Twitter and how everyone I know is constantly spouting opinions about anything and everything and I think, Why not me?

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No, really, go the f*ck to sleep

A friend of mine, an experienced mother who had her children before I had mine, told me once that every parent would find one of the basic biological functions of her child a nearly impossible challenge. For some, it’s feeding, an area rife with conflict (breast or bottle, rice cereal or baby-led weaning) and crowded with what the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiburg called “ghosts in the nursery”—those powerful, often unconscious, voices from our past that can affect our parenting, whether we know it or not. Other parents wig out over elimination, getting locked into potty-training power struggles, endlessly strategizing over their little one’s constipation. More from DAME: "What Happens When Women Literally Fight Back?" But one issue looms above the others: sleep. It’s why so many parents of babies and toddlers find themselves dreading nighttime, even though they themselves are exhausted. They know that each bedtime can become a battle, whether with a six-month-old doing her best to scuttle your dreams of an easy sleep-training regimen, or a 3-year-old whose requirements for falling asleep have grown to include six books, three songs, and half an hour of back-rubbing (with an option to repeat the whole thing if he isn’t quite feeling sleepy yet). Whether we follow one of the many, many, many sleep-training programs available today or eschew them entirely for the family bed, many of us feel guilty about our choice. And in the first year of parenting, we are often simply too tired to think too deeply about anything at all. Just how exhausted are the parents of young children? “The other day I stood trying to lock my cubicle at work with my car remote key,” said one mother on a Facebook parenting group. Another drove to the wrong house and tried to get inside with her groceries. More dangerously, one recalls falling asleep at the wheel at every streetlight: “People had to honk at me every time to get me going.” The lack of sleep can make things surreal. Mothers report hallucinating while sleep-deprived, panicking in the middle of the night that they can’t find the baby who is sleeping in their arms. “I also have a friend who once tried to nurse her cat in the middle of the night,” another mother writes. Bronwyn Becker Charlton, a developmental psychologist and co-founder of the Seedlings Group, sees a lot of parental exhaustion. “I think that a lot of times, we have very low expectations of what a child is capable of,” she says, adding that parents “take for granted that they signed up for having sleepless nights.” But, she argues, this doesn’t have to be the case. “A lot of parents feel guilty because they feel like it’s selfish that they want to get good sleep,” Charlton says. “And yet to learn to sleep well, to be a good sleeper, is an incredible gift to give to your child. Sleep is up there with breathing and eating in terms of its relevance for health.” More from DAME: "Why Are More Parents Homeschooling Their Kids?" Charlton, who often works with families over years, touching base as their children grow, says she sees parents change their minds about how they feel about sleep. Many parents start out letting their children sleep with them, she says, only to come to her years later saying, “we loved the idea of the family bed, but now our four-year-old is such a fitful sleeper, he kicks and rolls, and I cannot sleep.” A preschooler can be taught new habits—Charlton points out that kids are resilient—but her strong message is that it’s smartest to begin as you mean to proceed. If you don’t want a kid in your bed, don’t take the baby into your bed. But many of us do, even if we don’t particularly want to, because it’s the only way anyone gets any sleep at all—this despite the long-running public health debate about baby sleep safety. Despite a growing chorus of support for bed-sharing (and more evidence-based guidelines for doing it safely), the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to advise against it. When the experts disagree so vehemently, and they all sound so convincing, and we are just so damn tired, is it any wonder we mostly feel we’re getting it wrong? The runaway success of Adam Mansbach’s 2011 parody of children’s book, "Go the Fuck to Sleep," is proof of how ubiquitous parental stress over children’s sleep has become. Ben Reiss, a literature professor at work on a cultural history of sleep, notes that the book’s Amazon page is filled with “readers’ cathartic responses” to a book that somehow captures “contemporary American parents’ heroic attempts to suppress their frustration with the strange system we’ve been led to believe is normal or even natural.” Perhaps, Reiss suggests, getting our kids to sleep all alone every night is so difficult because it’s not particularly natural. “One of the really big issues is that, for the last century and a half we’ve been living under an orthodoxy that says that children have to sleep in their own rooms and sleep all through the night,” Reiss says. “We expend tremendous amounts of energy trying to make this thing happen, which before that time never happened anywhere else in the world.” And, he points out, “it certainly doesn’t seem to be anything that children want. They fight it every step of the way. And then, what’s the first thing they want to do when they’re old enough to form independent friendships? They want sleepovers, they want to sleep together.” How much do our children want to sleep with us? I’ve heard that some kids are genuinely happiest in their own beds—probably those kids who were expertly sleep-trained by very competent and determined parents—but both of mine were more like Twitter persona Honest Toddler, whose tweets and blog posts about claiming "the big bed" perfectly capture what many of us go through at night. “I know that my nighttime requests, occasional flatulence, REM screaming, and kicks to the face can be disconcerting,” Honest Toddler admits, arguing that it’s a toddler’s prerogative to share the big bed, rather than face the dark of night alone. More from DAME: "Why is the FDA Poisoning the Beauty Industry?" Between these two strong messages—society saying that babies need to learn to sleep independently, babies saying that they would really love to sleep with parents, thanks—most parents, Reiss says, “are caught. There’s no middle ground.” And then there are the ghosts in our own nurseries about what it means to be left alone at night. I remember lying in my bed as a small child, afraid of the dark and aware that it was against the rules to climb into my parents’ bed unless I was deathly ill. I envied my brothers, who shared the bedroom next to mine. When I had my own kids I overcorrected. My nighttime parenting style was all about maximum nurturing: nursing to sleep, reading to sleep, singing to sleep, snuggling to sleep. My kids never used pacifiers or loveys. I became their pacifier and lovey. It was a total parenting fail—and yet, somehow, it got me and my children through the nights. These days, the big one is in college and the little one almost always stays in his bed. And none of us is afraid of the dark.

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Two more shootings and a lockdown at U.S. universities in one day: Our sick gun culture just keeps getting worse

There were two shootings at U.S. universities in a span of less than 12 hours on Friday. A lockdown was also called for an unconfirmed third shooting. Arizona An 18-year-old college student shot four members of the Delta Chi fraternity at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ in the early hours of the morning. One student died; the other three are wounded. The shooter, freshman Steven Jones, survived and was taken into police custody. Texas At around noon, three suspects shot and killed a student and wounded another at an apartment complex on the campus of Texas Southern University, in Houston, TX. Two suspects were taken into police custody. The third suspect remains at large. Kentucky Mere hours later, another active shooter situation was announced at Jefferson Community and Technical College (JCTC) in Louisville, KY. A call reporting a shot fired was made around 3:30 PM EST. The shooting is unconfirmed. The Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) reported at 3:59 that JCTC is "currently in lockdown due to a report of violent incident on our technical campus." Less than half an hour later, KCTCS announced that the campus emergency was over. SWAT officers were called to sweep a building, but were called down around 4:15. Details of the incident have not yet been released by authorities, and it is unclear if anyone was taken into custody. More than one shooting per day Exactly one week before, in Roseburg, OR, shooter Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people at Umpqua Community College before committing suicide. President Obama visited with survivors and victims' families in Oregon on Friday, while the three incidents took place across the nation. In the first 238 day of 2015, there were over 247 mass shootings -- more than one per day, on average. Gun control advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety has documented 149 school shootings in the U.S. since 2013, an average of almost one per week.There were two shootings at U.S. universities in a span of less than 12 hours on Friday. A lockdown was also called for an unconfirmed third shooting. Arizona An 18-year-old college student shot four members of the Delta Chi fraternity at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ in the early hours of the morning. One student died; the other three are wounded. The shooter, freshman Steven Jones, survived and was taken into police custody. Texas At around noon, three suspects shot and killed a student and wounded another at an apartment complex on the campus of Texas Southern University, in Houston, TX. Two suspects were taken into police custody. The third suspect remains at large. Kentucky Mere hours later, another active shooter situation was announced at Jefferson Community and Technical College (JCTC) in Louisville, KY. A call reporting a shot fired was made around 3:30 PM EST. The shooting is unconfirmed. The Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) reported at 3:59 that JCTC is "currently in lockdown due to a report of violent incident on our technical campus." Less than half an hour later, KCTCS announced that the campus emergency was over. SWAT officers were called to sweep a building, but were called down around 4:15. Details of the incident have not yet been released by authorities, and it is unclear if anyone was taken into custody. More than one shooting per day Exactly one week before, in Roseburg, OR, shooter Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people at Umpqua Community College before committing suicide. President Obama visited with survivors and victims' families in Oregon on Friday, while the three incidents took place across the nation. In the first 238 day of 2015, there were over 247 mass shootings -- more than one per day, on average. Gun control advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety has documented 149 school shootings in the U.S. since 2013, an average of almost one per week.

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Beltway media beclowns itself again: Kevin McCarthy, GOP extremism & the Village’s asinine false equivalence

Surfing through the cable news channels yesterday morning, it was clear that the beltway wags were preparing to spend the day indicting Hillary Clinton for buckling under pressure to left-wing fanatics who have taken over the Democratic Party and forced her to take a position against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal against her will. The word had gone forth from NBC's First Read that Hillary Clinton had obviously flip-flopped from her true beliefs on the issue in the most flagrantly dishonest way possible and had therefore cemented "every negative stereotype about her." During MSNBC's" Andrea Mitchell Reports," they even called in Chris Matthews to analyze the fallout from this terrible decision and the talking heads agreed this showed the left was driving the train. With a socialist gunning for the presidency (a socialist who won't even agree to join the Democratic Party!), unions calling the shots on trade and tree-huggers bringing the hammer down on the environment, the Democrats were in the same predicament as the right with Hillary Clinton being forced, in Matthews' words, to "bow to the extreme." And so a new Beltway meme was born. Or rather, it was stillborn, since within minutes of Mitchell and Matthews declaring that the Democratic Party's hippies were driving the party straight over the cliff with all their unreasonable demands, the news broke that the presumptive Speaker of the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, had dropped his news that he was withdrawing from the race. What followed was the kind of chaos you normally only see during a natural disaster or a bomb scare, with sweaty reporters shoving microphones into the face of every person who looked like he or she might be a Republican and anchors back in the studios shaking their heads in disbelief. How on earth could this have happened? Of course, it was entirely predictable. After all, John Boehner had been forced to resign because he simply could not get his fractious caucus to work together to do the business Congress is tasked with doing. And John Boehner was a 25-year congressional veteran who understood how to work every lever to get that job done. It remains a mystery why anyone thought that Kevin McCarthy -- a man who had only been in Congress since 2007 and whose rhetorical skills made George W. Bush sound like Martin Luther King Jr. by comparison -- would fare better than Boehner. MSNBC's Luke Russert seemed to think that he would be more successful because had gone to some lengths to "stay in touch" with all the members by texting them frequently, but that was about it. McCarthy's epic gaffe, admitting that the Select Committee on Benghazi is a partisan sham, was likely the most important reason for his fall from grace and subsequent inability to put together enough votes to win. And there were rumors circulating about a personal scandal. But by all accounts it was the anti-establishment Freedom Caucus yanking McCarthy's chain so hard with demands for greater say in policy and process that made him realize he couldn't win the vote. Evidently, his assurances that he would not be John Boehner were simply not enough to assuage their concerns. (All that texting seems not to have done the trick after all.) Indeed, one wonders why everyone assumed they would fall in line -- after all, they never had when he was the party whip. Robert Costa at the Washington Post reported that the far right leveled some specific demands that McCarthy simply couldn't meet:

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), the leader of the House Tea Party Caucus, asked McCarthy to publicly oppose efforts by establishment groups — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others — to run radio and TV ads criticizing conservatives who defied their own leaders.

In other words, they wanted the Speaker of the House to take their side in disputes with ... himself. Once he understood the impossibility of his position, McCarthy wisely withdrew. The media were completely shocked -- as they are every single time the House GOP caucus behaves like the radicals they are. It's not as if this is the first time, after all. But they had convinced themselves that it made sense that the amateurish Kevin McCarthy could transcend the troubles that plagued the much more experienced John Boehner. Despite years of evidence, they simply cannot accept that the Republican caucus is completely ungovernable so they, and the GOP establishment, turned their hopeful eyes to yet another savior: Paul Ryan, who, just as Kevin McCarthy had been days before, was seen as a man uniquely capable of bringing the feuding factions together. And once again the reaction was swift: https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... Luke Russert noted the tweets and said on MSNBC:

To demonstrate just how difficult it is in the House GOP conference Laura Ingraham, noted conservative commentator, said, "no, he's a young gun" we should do three young guns and you're out," talking about Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. So if someone like Laura Ingraham who has a huge following it the conservative blogosphere and on radio airwaves, if she's opposed to it, it will have a lot of influence on House conservatives who will look skeptically on Paul Ryan.

It sounded as though Russert, being so badly burned by his blithe assumptions about McCarthy, was finally developing some healthy skepticism about the GOP's ability to govern. But then he added, "That being said, he's trusted by a lot of conservatives because he's gone after a lot of the president's programs." But would he be willing to publicly oppose anyone who criticized the Freedom Caucus? Would he allow the Freedom Caucus to have equal say in the process and policy agenda? Would he agree to more government shutdowns and hostage schemes? Would he be a willing hostage himself? These are the terms, after all. Moreover is it reasonable to blithely assume that this is someone these people will trust?

Ryan’s fellow House Republicans have largely put the kibosh on moving forward with immigration reform this year, but some key GOP lawmakers are still lobbying their colleagues publicly and privately to tackle immigration. The 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee is among figures who have urged the GOP to embrace an overhaul. “To me, it’s not a question of ‘if’ we fix our broken immigration laws,” Ryan said Wednesday at a breakfast hosted by the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “It’s really a question of ‘when.’” Ryan called the nation’s immigration laws “chief” among the problems that are curbing economic growth. Noting the rate of retirement among baby boomers, Ryan said reforming the immigration system is necessary to fill future jobs. “Please know that we understand the value of immigration,” Ryan told the crowd. “We know its importance; we know its roots, its history here in America; and we have ideas on how to make this go forward and make it work so that we do have the rule of law, so that we do have reform, so that we’re not in the same position 15 years down the road.”

And yet MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said that Ryan is perfect because he can "cut deals," as if cutting deals isn't exactly what these people hate about "the establishment." Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy sees him as a religious figure:

Asked if anyone could unite the conference, Gowdy was unequivocal that Ryan was the man for the job. “Either him or the fellow who just spoke to us,” he said, “but he went back to Italy.”

Maybe they're correct and Paul Ryan is The One they've all been waiting for, the man who can bind up the party's wounds and make it whole again. But you'd think they'd be just a tiny bit chagrined by their assumption that these anti-establishment rebels are going to fall in line simply because Paul Ryan is Paul Ryan. Say what you will, but they seem pretty serious about their agenda. Nobody knows at this point if Ryan will agree to be drafted. He's consistently said no up until now but is reportedly mulling it over. It's hard to imagine why he would take the job. Unlike the media and the political establishment, he probably recognizes that he isn't a magician or a miracle worker. And perhaps the Freedom Caucus has decided they've made their point and they'll acquiesce to Ryan and agree to obstruct another day. But the underlying dynamics that led to yesterday's circus haven't disappeared. At some point, the Beltway media is going to have to grapple with the fact that the Republican Party is no longer functional and that this is not a dynamic that's mirrored on the other side. There is simply no comparison between Hillary Clinton responding to the voters and her rivals on specific issues as she runs for president and this lunacy that's taking place in the Republican party. What she's doing is called "politics." What they are doing is ... something else. But they haven't grappled with it yet. Chris Matthews summarized the events to Brian Williams this way:

I think the headline for the day is "the center cannot hold" to quote Yeats.The center isn't holding in American politics today. The center right isn't holding. We'll see if the center left and Hillary Clinton will hold as well. It seems the poles are winning, the poles of right and left are winning the arguments, getting the press. The fact that Trump is on the television set every night, free media, that he is the best show in town, is really a reflection that the house of representatives, particularly has dropped the ball... The center didn't hold today and the forces of the right and the left are starting to look interesting and that's a problem.

Perhaps the most poignant comment of the day came from Norman Ornstein, an establishment figure who, along with Thomas Mann, wrote the book about the right's extremism and was shunned by the political media: https://twitter.com/NormOrnstein/stat... through the cable news channels yesterday morning, it was clear that the beltway wags were preparing to spend the day indicting Hillary Clinton for buckling under pressure to left-wing fanatics who have taken over the Democratic Party and forced her to take a position against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal against her will. The word had gone forth from NBC's First Read that Hillary Clinton had obviously flip-flopped from her true beliefs on the issue in the most flagrantly dishonest way possible and had therefore cemented "every negative stereotype about her." During MSNBC's" Andrea Mitchell Reports," they even called in Chris Matthews to analyze the fallout from this terrible decision and the talking heads agreed this showed the left was driving the train. With a socialist gunning for the presidency (a socialist who won't even agree to join the Democratic Party!), unions calling the shots on trade and tree-huggers bringing the hammer down on the environment, the Democrats were in the same predicament as the right with Hillary Clinton being forced, in Matthews' words, to "bow to the extreme." And so a new Beltway meme was born. Or rather, it was stillborn, since within minutes of Mitchell and Matthews declaring that the Democratic Party's hippies were driving the party straight over the cliff with all their unreasonable demands, the news broke that the presumptive Speaker of the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, had dropped his news that he was withdrawing from the race. What followed was the kind of chaos you normally only see during a natural disaster or a bomb scare, with sweaty reporters shoving microphones into the face of every person who looked like he or she might be a Republican and anchors back in the studios shaking their heads in disbelief. How on earth could this have happened? Of course, it was entirely predictable. After all, John Boehner had been forced to resign because he simply could not get his fractious caucus to work together to do the business Congress is tasked with doing. And John Boehner was a 25-year congressional veteran who understood how to work every lever to get that job done. It remains a mystery why anyone thought that Kevin McCarthy -- a man who had only been in Congress since 2007 and whose rhetorical skills made George W. Bush sound like Martin Luther King Jr. by comparison -- would fare better than Boehner. MSNBC's Luke Russert seemed to think that he would be more successful because had gone to some lengths to "stay in touch" with all the members by texting them frequently, but that was about it. McCarthy's epic gaffe, admitting that the Select Committee on Benghazi is a partisan sham, was likely the most important reason for his fall from grace and subsequent inability to put together enough votes to win. And there were rumors circulating about a personal scandal. But by all accounts it was the anti-establishment Freedom Caucus yanking McCarthy's chain so hard with demands for greater say in policy and process that made him realize he couldn't win the vote. Evidently, his assurances that he would not be John Boehner were simply not enough to assuage their concerns. (All that texting seems not to have done the trick after all.) Indeed, one wonders why everyone assumed they would fall in line -- after all, they never had when he was the party whip. Robert Costa at the Washington Post reported that the far right leveled some specific demands that McCarthy simply couldn't meet:

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), the leader of the House Tea Party Caucus, asked McCarthy to publicly oppose efforts by establishment groups — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others — to run radio and TV ads criticizing conservatives who defied their own leaders.

In other words, they wanted the Speaker of the House to take their side in disputes with ... himself. Once he understood the impossibility of his position, McCarthy wisely withdrew. The media were completely shocked -- as they are every single time the House GOP caucus behaves like the radicals they are. It's not as if this is the first time, after all. But they had convinced themselves that it made sense that the amateurish Kevin McCarthy could transcend the troubles that plagued the much more experienced John Boehner. Despite years of evidence, they simply cannot accept that the Republican caucus is completely ungovernable so they, and the GOP establishment, turned their hopeful eyes to yet another savior: Paul Ryan, who, just as Kevin McCarthy had been days before, was seen as a man uniquely capable of bringing the feuding factions together. And once again the reaction was swift: https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/sta... Luke Russert noted the tweets and said on MSNBC:

To demonstrate just how difficult it is in the House GOP conference Laura Ingraham, noted conservative commentator, said, "no, he's a young gun" we should do three young guns and you're out," talking about Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. So if someone like Laura Ingraham who has a huge following it the conservative blogosphere and on radio airwaves, if she's opposed to it, it will have a lot of influence on House conservatives who will look skeptically on Paul Ryan.

It sounded as though Russert, being so badly burned by his blithe assumptions about McCarthy, was finally developing some healthy skepticism about the GOP's ability to govern. But then he added, "That being said, he's trusted by a lot of conservatives because he's gone after a lot of the president's programs." But would he be willing to publicly oppose anyone who criticized the Freedom Caucus? Would he allow the Freedom Caucus to have equal say in the process and policy agenda? Would he agree to more government shutdowns and hostage schemes? Would he be a willing hostage himself? These are the terms, after all. Moreover is it reasonable to blithely assume that this is someone these people will trust?

Ryan’s fellow House Republicans have largely put the kibosh on moving forward with immigration reform this year, but some key GOP lawmakers are still lobbying their colleagues publicly and privately to tackle immigration. The 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee is among figures who have urged the GOP to embrace an overhaul. “To me, it’s not a question of ‘if’ we fix our broken immigration laws,” Ryan said Wednesday at a breakfast hosted by the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “It’s really a question of ‘when.’” Ryan called the nation’s immigration laws “chief” among the problems that are curbing economic growth. Noting the rate of retirement among baby boomers, Ryan said reforming the immigration system is necessary to fill future jobs. “Please know that we understand the value of immigration,” Ryan told the crowd. “We know its importance; we know its roots, its history here in America; and we have ideas on how to make this go forward and make it work so that we do have the rule of law, so that we do have reform, so that we’re not in the same position 15 years down the road.”

And yet MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said that Ryan is perfect because he can "cut deals," as if cutting deals isn't exactly what these people hate about "the establishment." Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy sees him as a religious figure:

Asked if anyone could unite the conference, Gowdy was unequivocal that Ryan was the man for the job. “Either him or the fellow who just spoke to us,” he said, “but he went back to Italy.”

Maybe they're correct and Paul Ryan is The One they've all been waiting for, the man who can bind up the party's wounds and make it whole again. But you'd think they'd be just a tiny bit chagrined by their assumption that these anti-establishment rebels are going to fall in line simply because Paul Ryan is Paul Ryan. Say what you will, but they seem pretty serious about their agenda. Nobody knows at this point if Ryan will agree to be drafted. He's consistently said no up until now but is reportedly mulling it over. It's hard to imagine why he would take the job. Unlike the media and the political establishment, he probably recognizes that he isn't a magician or a miracle worker. And perhaps the Freedom Caucus has decided they've made their point and they'll acquiesce to Ryan and agree to obstruct another day. But the underlying dynamics that led to yesterday's circus haven't disappeared. At some point, the Beltway media is going to have to grapple with the fact that the Republican Party is no longer functional and that this is not a dynamic that's mirrored on the other side. There is simply no comparison between Hillary Clinton responding to the voters and her rivals on specific issues as she runs for president and this lunacy that's taking place in the Republican party. What she's doing is called "politics." What they are doing is ... something else. But they haven't grappled with it yet. Chris Matthews summarized the events to Brian Williams this way:

I think the headline for the day is "the center cannot hold" to quote Yeats.The center isn't holding in American politics today. The center right isn't holding. We'll see if the center left and Hillary Clinton will hold as well. It seems the poles are winning, the poles of right and left are winning the arguments, getting the press. The fact that Trump is on the television set every night, free media, that he is the best show in town, is really a reflection that the house of representatives, particularly has dropped the ball... The center didn't hold today and the forces of the right and the left are starting to look interesting and that's a problem.

Perhaps the most poignant comment of the day came from Norman Ornstein, an establishment figure who, along with Thomas Mann, wrote the book about the right's extremism and was shunned by the political media: https://twitter.com/NormOrnstein/stat...

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Just shut up, Bristol Palin: You are the last person who should talk about birth control

Bristol Palin, I know that you don't care that a lot of us have actually been rooting for you over the past several years. And then you constantly have to go and act like a completely insensitive, ignorant tool. You've had a lot of obstacles in your life — you've been a small town, teenaged single mom, and frankly, your mother is a goddamn nightmare. This year you went through a broken engagement and the announcement, soon after, that you're pregnant again — not just a major embarrassment for someone who's been a paid ambassador for teen pregnancy prevention but no doubt a genuinely stressful and challenging situation. You're still only 24 years old. You have at times displayed flickering moments of self-deprecation — you've danced on TV in a gorilla suit! And when you went public with your pregnancy, you wrote with a vulnerable candidness, "I’ve been trying my hardest to keep my chin up on this one. At the end of the day there’s nothing I can’t do with God by my side, and I know I am fully capable of handling anything that is put in front of me with dignity and grace. Life moves on no matter what. So no matter how you feel, you get up, get dressed, show up, and never give up." I want to be believe the girl who can look at her life and her choices with that level of self-compassion and hopefulness is capable of saying and doing good things in the world. And then you open your mouth again and it's like, where did that girl go? In a straight up bonkers recent post on her consistently incoherent Patheos blog, Palin — America's least credible source on the topic of birth control — asserts, "Life isn’t so innocent and carefree for some 10 years old in Washington State. This summer a report came out claiming that some schools in Washington were giving free birth control implants to children as young as 10 years old! These birth control devices are implanted in a girl’s uterus, and all of this can be done without a parent’s consent!" She adds, "It is crazy that the government is offering a controversial form of birth control that can have serious life-long side effects to 10-year-old CHILDREN, but then to do all of this behind a parent’s back is simply outrageous!" Earlier this year, the conservative site Judicial Watch obtained public records from the state for the past three years that break down the number of students who received birth control implants and their ages. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the girls are between the ages of 17 and 20. A small number are between 10 and 12. Before we continue, let's remember here that they don't hand out IUDs at the cafeteria — it's a medical procedure, not, as Judicial Watch suggests, a case of "State Gives 10-Yr-Olds Free Birth Control Implants." I know this is a radical idea if your last name is Palin, but let's go to the facts. As Snopes explains, "Over half the states in the U.S. allow all minors 12 and older to consent to contraceptive services." That does not mean that they're all having sex -- note how the HPV vaccine is recommended for middle schoolers. But did you know that IUDs can also be used to control periods? It's true. So imagine you're 10 and you're dealing with heavy, difficult menstrual cycles. Maybe you want to explore your options. And if the IUD is so "controversial," why does the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say it's safe for adolescents?  Palin acts like schools are tossing IUDs into playgrounds and kids are just running around, grabbing Mirenas without telling their parents. What she isn't doing is: A) Asking if a girl might obtain birth control for a reason other than birth control, B) Considering that just because parental consent is not required that it is never asked for or given. Shockingly, many loving, responsible families understand that as teens get older, many become sexually active, and they want their kids to make smart, healthy choices and protect themselves from unplanned pregnancies. And while Palin is extraordinarily fortunate to have made lemonade of her own circumstances, helping kids avoid unintended pregnancies is great for women, it's great for families, and it saves everybody a whole ton of money in services. She also isn't acknowledging that the reality is that lots of adolescents well over the age of 10 do have sex without their parents' knowledge, so maybe they should go ahead and get contraception without their parents' knowledge too. And wow, you'd think after two pregnancies of her own, she'd finally understand and have a little empathy on that point.

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Jeb Bush’s gross “Redskins” pandering: “Washington” is pejorative, not the slur

Republican voters have made it abundantly clear that they want out with the old and in with the new, forcing so-called establishment Republicans out of Washington and insisting that their nominee for president be as disconnected from the Beltway as possible. And boy does that make Jeb Bush nervous. The former Florida governor, never the most eloquent candidate on the campaign trail, has been whipping himself into a frenzy deriding the less than 70 square mile colony while defending the racially offensive name of the areas NFL team, the Washington Redskins. Appearing on the conservative Hugh Hewitt Show following the turmoil that befell the House Republicans after Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy made a surprise announcement withdrawing himself from the race for speaker, Bush made an awkward joke meant to disparage a "dysfunctional" D.C.. "There was a big argument about the Washington Redskins, the 'Redskins' being a pejorative term," Bush said. "I think 'Washington' is the pejorative term, not the 'Redskins.'" “I don’t think they should change it,” he told ABC’s Rick Klein and ESPN’s Andy Katz last month. “But again, I don’t think politicians ought to have any say in that to be honest with you. I don’t find it offensive. Native American tribes generally don’t find it offensive." “I don’t find it offensive. Native American tribes generally don’t find it offensive,” he repeated on “