Damn his eyes
By Jim Washburn
Why won’t Obama ever look straight into the camera? I don’t trust a guy who won’t look me in the eye. HE MUST HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE!”
My wife the barber cuts a lot of Republican hair, and has heard the above refrain from more than one client. Similar sentiments have been spreading on the Web. When Obama gave some newsman an impromptu and moving eulogy on Tim Russert, all that one chatterer on a Fox News site got from it was that Obama obviously wasn’t speaking from the heart because his eyes were facing the ground.
Really? I’m going to type this next sentence while staring at the carpet: Fox News Site Web Chat Lady, you are about the dumbest pile of clown vomit to ever walk around in panties.
I don’t know, that felt pretty heartfelt to me.
For some conservatives, this eye thing is one more proof that Obama’s hiding something. Like you wouldn’t be if you were a flag-allergic, radical-leftie, madrassa-made Muslim Manchurian Candidate with a whitey-hating wife, who can’t wait to be president so he can strew chicken bones all over the White House lawn and let his secret brother Ahmadinejad park an A-bomb in the Vermeil Room?
That’s the conservative take on him. Like most of you, I have conservative friends. It’s our burden. They send me the “If Obama Wins” e-mails depicting a mosque-domed White House and McHammed’s camel burger stands. They heed the right wing pundits predicting major terrorist attacks at home if Obama wins, which ranks right up there with the doomsday scare tactics Democrats used against Goldwater in 1964. What will Republicans scare voters with next, footage from The Naked Prey of spear-heaving Africans chasing sunburned white people through the bush?
I don’t get the reasoning. It was OK to have a president who looked like a card sharp – Nixon (who did indeed fund his first congressional run with poker money fleeced from returning WWII sailors – or a president who smirks like he just peed in your pool – Bush (who did indeed pee in your pool; check the pH) – but we shouldn’t vote for an angelic-looking guy who is maybe our most intelligent, compassionate choice since Adlai Stevenson because he doesn’t eye-fuck the camera?
Maybe Obama’s not looking in the lens because he’s busy looking a real person in the eye, or maybe he’s concentrating on what he’s talking about – not a bad quality in a president, all things considered – or he’s looking down because he’s humble, or looking up because his eyes are on the prize.
You can’t win. In 2008 some Americans won’t vote for Obama because he doesn’t make eye contact, while not many years ago – and for about 200 of them – if a black guy in America didn’t keep his eyes cast meekly toward the ground he risked being lynched. We’ve come a long way, baby!
I kind of like John McCain. It’s a shame he’s the nominee now, when the past eight years have decimated his party’s credibility to govern until the glaciers come back, if then. It’s another shame to see the abhorrent stuff he’s doing in the attempt to become president. McCain’s just “relaunched” his campaign, “relaunch” being the abbreviation these days for, “Well, we sure fucked that up. Let’s try mixing diviner’s sage and Red Bull and see what happens.” The guy now at the tiller, Steve Schmidt, is straight outta the posse of MC Rove, who, of course, waged one of the filthiest political campaigns ever against McCain in the 2000 election. That means any day now you can expect the McCain camp to start a whisper campaign accusing Obama of fathering black babies.
It makes me want to holler, throw up both my hands.
New Hope for the Wretched: I do my own yard work, since I don’t like the chemicals and smog-spewing mowers and blowers of yard professionals, plus they make more money than I do. Maybe for the elite there are eco-services where merino sheep nuzzle your lawn to a uniform height and ants are personally dispatched with a hammer, but not on my block.
Except for a brief fling with a power mower, I’ve always gone acoustic, beginning with a heavy-duty push mower that came with the house 32 years ago, now a rusty hulk in the yard somewhere. It was replaced with a Great States mower from Home Depot – their sole manual mower at the time, and more expensive than some powered models – and it is a sad example of the declining quality of American life. Flimsy and balky, even the smallest twig tosses a penalty flag into its forward motion, and it’s unable to cut tall grass at all, oft times necessitating my mowing the entire yard with an electric weed whacker. At least the back-and-forth motion is prepping me for my senior years on the beach, with a metal detector looking for change.
Make way for the Sunlawn LMM40! Much as the Dyson vacuum made folks enthusiastic about vacuuming again (call a doctor if it lasts more than six hours), the Sunlawn and the pricier German Brill mower it’s based on are reinvigorating the art of mowing. Germans have been mowing through things ever since the Maginot Line, and the precision mechanism in the colorful, cute, lightweight, whisper-quiet Sunlawn lunges through lawns with gusto. And unless, like mine, your lawn already has more thatch than Georgina Spelvin, you can do without a grass catcher and let the clippings serve as mulch.
You’ll find the Sunlawn LMM40 for under $170 (and its little sister, the LMM35 for about $155) including shipping at several eco-minded websites. Used in conjunction with the margarita recipe we shared here a few weeks ago, you’ll love the time spent in your yard, and you’ll be helping to save the planet. If you live in an apartment, ignore the above and head straight to the margaritas.
Published: 07/09/2008
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