Essential reading

Carl Hiaasen on a roll:

It's fashionable to be mad at the government these days, but many folks are unclear about how to join the movement.

The first step is to master the idiom of outrage. It's not just government, it's Big Government. Or even better: Big Guv'ment.

Huge, clunky, intrusive, exorbitant -- that's Uncle Sam. Get off our backs, get out of our lives and let go of our wallets!

The sentiment has been around for 234 years, but never before did we have the Internet to make it feel so fresh and original. Every red-blooded patriot should aspire to a life that's more or less free of government, which apparently can't do anything right.

Get the rest (What did the Romans ever do for us?) at the Miami Herald site. Sphere: Related Content

Momento mori

It's one of those senior moments: the report of a death which ... doesn't seem quite timely.

The New York Times has a neat reflection, by Charles McGrath, on the death of Fess Parker:

If you grew up in the 1950s, then the character Davy Crockett, played by Fess Parker, who died at 85 late last week, is an essential part of your mental furniture. His ballad most likely still plays over and over in your head, especially the fourth line, with its odd Appalachian spelling and suggestion of folk tale strangeness: “Kilt him a b’ar when he was only 3.” Cosseted in your urban or suburban television room in Eisenhower America, how could you fail to be impressed by a feat like that?

It was, as Malcolm can testify, nearly as impressive in Eden/Macmillan East Anglia.

McGrath continues:

In truth, Davy Crockett was less the “king of the wild frontier,” as the song goes on to say, than the king of a merchandising juggernaut that convinced millions of children that they needed to own Davy Crockett pajamas and lunchboxes and coloring books and official Davy Crockett coonskin caps. We actually wore these little ratty-looking toupees with no irony or embarrassment at all.

For the Seattle Times, Dennis McLellan expands on this commercial epiphany:

TV's "King of the Wild Frontier" also touched off a merchandising frenzy: 10 million coonskin caps were sold, along with toy "Old Betsy" rifles, buckskin shirts, T-shirts, coloring books, guitars, bath towels, bedspreads, wallets — anything with the Crockett name attached.

Viewers also fell in love with the show's catchy theme song. Bill Hayes' version of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" soared to No. 1 on the hit parade and remained there for 13 weeks.

"It was an explosion beyond anyone's comprehension," Mr. Parker recalled decades later. "The power of television, which was still new, was demonstrated for the first time."

Even Disney was taken by surprise.

Disney planned three Davy Crockett adventures, with the hero dying heroically at the Alamo as the conclusion of the third. Sticking with McLellan:

"We had no idea what was going to happen to Crockett, " [Disney] later said. "Why, by the time the first show finally got on the air, we were already shooting the third one and calmly killing Davy off at the Alamo. It became one of the biggest overnight hits in TV history, and there we were with just three films and a dead hero."

Crockett and McLellan (both names from Galloway, both among the Border reivers), Parker (the North of England), McGrath (Donegal and, as McGraw, the County Down) ... is there a pattern developing here?

The title of the NYT piece, by the way, is:

An Enemy of Raccoons but a Friend of Marketeers.

The death of innocence

Malcolm recalls a time when any Norfolk moggie or squirrel went in fear of imminent re-invention as pre-adolescent headgear. Television came late to our part of the world. Image-making pyjamas and lunchboxes were bourgeois steps too far, too grand, too alien for our comprehension. But wildlife and the neighbour's pet pussy ... that's what catapults were for. After that, and a bit of amateur taxidermy, you, too, could act out the last episode. With added verisimilitude and confidence, if all other heads were crowned with mere rabbit pelts.

The Walt Disney Corporation (which Carl Hiaasen, much later, properly nailed as Team Rodent) was already getting into commercial exploitation of the dream-factory, and thereby of the impressionable young to be separated from their limited loot. Disney apparently withheld Parker from more grown-up pictures, working with John Ford (Jeffrey Hunter's part in The Searchers) or Marilyn Monroe (Don Murray got that one), for fear of contaminating the brand.

And thereby hangs another tale

McGrath's delicious punchline is:

It seems entirely fitting that in later life, having come to the end of his acting career, Mr. Parker reinvented himself as a successful vintner. Once an idol of baby boomers, a model of coonskin fortitude, he now became for them a source of middle-aged balm and solace, making wine they could sip in the evening as the shadows lengthened. Davy would probably have abstained, but he lived in an America where people were nobler and firmer of purpose.

So, Ave atque Vale! Fess Elisha Parker.

We shall not see your like again. It doesn't sell in the 21st Century.

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Whammy? Whammy!

Brits got it, thanks to Chris Patten, who engineered the "double whammy" of his own: cooking up the poster slogan that won it for the Tories in 1992, while managing to lose his own seat at Bath in the same election.

This being Britain, the staider columnists tended to sneer at the populism of the term.

Malcolm assumed that Patten, a benign and civilised creature for a Tory, had borrowed it from the 1988 novel by Carl Hiaasen (left). If so, more credit to him. Particularly so, because in electoral terms, it was laying a bait to catch the passing attention of an easily-hooked dupe. And if ever the electorate was hooked, cooked, battered and fried, it was immediately after that election.

Al Capp

There were, among the more cerebral pundits, attempts to explain the imported term. As Malcolm recalls, most traced it back to the seminal Li'l Abner strip by Al Capp, where it was the weapon of choice of "Eagle-eye Fleagle" (apparently the agreed spelling, but not Al Capp's).

The Oxford English Dictionary (which, as habitués of this column well-know, is Malcolm's instant resort on these occasions) ascribes it to July of 1951:

Evil-Eye Fleegle is th' name, an' th' ‘whammy’ is my game. Mudder Nature endowed me wit' eyes which can putrefy citizens t' th' spot!.. There is th' ‘single whammy’! That, friend, is th' full, pure power o' one o' my evil eyes! It's dynamite, friend, an' I do not t'row it around lightly!.. And, lastly th' ‘double whammy’ namely, th' full power o' both eyes which I hopes I never hafta use.

That may be Eagle-eye Fleegle's most comprehensive self-definition, but (since the strip ran from 1934) it cannot be the first.

For one example, it is claimed that the first bombs of the Korean War were dropped by the B-29 Superfortress "Double Whammy" on 28 June 1950.

Yet even Li'l Abner is not the origin here. Al Capp "borrowed" the "Eagle-eye" from Ben Finkle, former boxer, from St Louis once upon a time, patronised by Dion O'Banion in Chicago's mob-wars, but a long-term resident of Miami, and possessor of the deadly look.

All of which is incidental, prompted by Malcolm re-reading The Final Days, Woodward and Bernstein's exhaustive (and even exhausting) follow-up to All the President's Men.

We reach Sunday, 28th July, 1974: the end of a climactic week in which the Supreme Court had ruled 8-0 that Nixon's tapes must be handed over to the Special Prosecutor and the House Judiciary Committee had approved the first article of impeachment. Nixon and his entourage are heading back to the capital:

Air Force One departed El Toro Air Base for Washington at 2:26 P.M. The mood on board was somber. [White House Chief of Staff Gen. Alexander] Haig and [Press Secretary Ron] Ziegler were forward in the President's cabin. Both went back to speak with the reporters in the press section, emphasizing the line they had adopted since the Judiciary Committee vote. There had been reverses, a "triple whammy", Haig conceded, but they had not given up on the vote in the full House. The President, Ziegler maintained, was disappointed with recent developments, but not discouraged. Haig did not foresee resignation.

Ah yes: there it is, again. Was that Patten's source? Sphere: Related Content

Not a celebrity, but get me out of here!

Two closely-related topics revisited over the Christmas dining table were

• which daughter, son-in-law and brood would be daft enough to want to occupy Redfellow Hovel over the 2012 Olympic period?
• what place of refuge, well away from Redfellow Hovel and North London, might shelter the Lady in his Life and Malcolm?

Chez Redfellow is totally tolerant of numerous perversions between consenting adults, so there is no active resentment of things athletic and sporting. It's just the endless boosting, ballyhoo and the bounty of billions.

All of which was reinforced by Carl Hiaasen's weekend piece for the Miami Herald.

The [American] National Football league are taking the hump over the facilities at Miami Dolphins stadium, where the annual Super Bowl is regularly held. The NFL are threatening to take their business elsewhere if the stadium is not upgraded to their requirements:

at a cost of $250 million, give or take.

Hiaasen is not convinced:

It's old-fashioned extortion, but the NFL has no shame. You'd have better luck negotiating with the Gambino family.

Forget the recession. Forget the fact that our boneheaded politicians just committed $490 million to a new baseball park that is doomed to be a budgetary suckhole for decades.

And forget the fact that the football stadium was renovated just a few years ago for $200 million-plus, and that the Dolphins admit they don't need any upgrades for regular-season games.

Remember: this is Hiaasen. We're in safe hands. It inevitably gets better:

Virtually every independent economic study, including one by the Florida Senate in 2005, has shown that publicly funded sports stadiums are a rotten deal for taxpayers.

Philip Porter, an economics professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, said that having an occasional Super Bowl in a major winter tourist destination such as Miami amounts to basically a hiccup.

"If you wanted economic impact,'' he told The Herald, "you'd do a lot better taking the money you would spend on a stadium and drop it out of a helicopter.''

The punchline comes from much, much nearer home, close to where (literally and metaphorically) Malcolm lives:

... based on recent history, there's good reason to worry that local leaders will surrender to the NFL's clumsy arm-twisting. If that happens, they deserve an angry flogging by fed-up voters.

Any officeholder who feels inclined to waste tax dollars on another stadium makeover should take a cue from The Who, the iconic rock band that will perform at this year's Super Bowl halftime.

Don't get fooled again

Err, yes. If those helicopters currently sowing the seeds of urban renewal over east London happen to lose direction, and shower Muswell Hill with green fertility, things might seem different. Meanwhile, there's always some consolation:

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Every picture tells a story


Malcolm doubts that the Miami Herald has a vast circulation here in the UK. He finds that not surprising, but it is a pity:

• not just because it might deter daft Brits from filling the motels of southern Florida in the sweaty, steaming summer months, when Brooklyn has returned to less torrid climes;
• nor because its thoroughbred stable of regular columnists include Carl Hiaasen (respec'! respec!);
  

but, in this case,

• because of Jim Morin's daily cartoon.

Today's is a gem (as above).

Malcolm noted that this means a second posting in the same day on remarkable examples of political graphic art.

Who said poking-a-stick in the other fellow's eye can't be fun? Sphere: Related Content

Down among the sweltering palms

Carl Hiaasen provides one of the annual (or so) treats in Malcolm's life. Those light satirical thrillers, with a message, are a proverbial Chinese take-away: enjoy one now, and you'll be hungry for another in two hours' time.

The essential message is environmental.

From that, Hiaasen expounds, oh so lightly, on the corruption and spectacular rape of southern Florida, where little old widow ladies and alligators (the reptile variety is the safer) vie for territory, in a locale for events:

... way beyond anything in a Tom Clancy novel ... the one place in the United States where the bar for bad behaviour is so high that nothing we do will be noticed, where we can walk into a flight training school and hand the guy six grand in cash, and ask to use the 747 simulator, except not for taking-off and landing, just for flying in circles, and they won't ask any questions... And they picked the right place ...

That's at 4:10 in this clip:



Is it all about to change?

First, as a result of the continuing efforts of thousands of decent folk (including Hiaasen himself) there came (flourish of trumpets!) the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). Now CERP would cost $20 billion.

Of course, back in 2000, this was estimable, generally deemed "a good thing", worthy of joint federal and state funding. For the eight years of the Bush Presidency, something significant happened: it effectively amounted to nothing, nada, zilch.

"Change that matters"

Now, curiously, inexplicably, magnificently, the ground rules have changed:

... the $279 million in federal funds earmarked largely for Glades restoration projects mark the single-largest amount that Congress and the White House have allocated since the joint federal-state project was approved in 2000. It's a start, finally.

The money comes from two sources. There is $183 million in a spending bill approved by Congress last month and $96 million from the federal-stimulus package for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers work. Together, these funds will get stalled projects started, such as restoring wetlands in the 55,000-acre Picayune Strand in Southwest Florida and building a reservoir to improve the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Palm Beach County. There also is funding for repairs on Lake Okeechobee's dike and an upgrading of the Tamiami Trail, though not enough to elevate the road, which is the best solution to impairment of sheet flow.

"Sheet flow"? Am I sure I heard that right?

Don't knock it:

There also is $25 million to help Monroe County replace its antiquated cesspool and septic tanks with a central-sewage system.

Hiaasen would probably reckon (and, until now, however surreal, he's been on the button), there's already some smart guy in southern Florida skimming the till.

So, Malcolm resolves:

• To pray for a new Hiaasen novel;
• To refer to Hiaasen's less-regular columns on line at the Miami Herald; and
• To lie back, and -- thinking of England and his Lady's weekly golfing exploits -- wait for delivery of the only two of Hiaasen's published books not already on his shelves:

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