Whenever I’m getting ready to start a new writing project, I feel the way I imagine a tire feels swelling with air.
Archive for the ‘equivalences’ Category.
Hollywood celebrities who “make statements on politics” resemble fart-cushions.
More than a few people wear their ignorance like an exterminator’s tent shrouding a house.
Al Gore is to politics as Paulie Shore is to movies and as Anna Nicole Smith is to television—surreal nonentities who inspire the kind of whickering laughter we produce when we can’t believe our eyes.
Republicans are to Conservatism what a septic tank is to a farm.
Liberals are to Classical Liberalism as the Karamazov brothers were to their father. Democrats are to Liberalism what Iago was to Othello.
When I contemplate elected representatives dealing with our problems, I feel like a lab assistant using a pair of waldos to scratch his balls.
Having sex without ardently affirming the rhapsodic beauty of the other person’s self, yearningly joining your whole sensibility with the other as well as your genitals, is like slam-banging down the street in just the chassis of a car; though perhaps, getting your rocks off, you don’t particularly mind how foolish and self-involved you might appear to bystanders. Of course I’d never deny the pleasure, for what’s its worth, of the little electric jitter that is what you have at the end if sex is all you’re after.
The workplace is like a theater for the performing arts.
Harrison Ford resembles an actor the way a sign painter resembles Michelangelo.
Diplomats relate to foreign affairs the way condoms relate to the penis, except that diplomats are reusable.
Southerners eat fried chicken the way a teething baby gums its knuckles.
Bill Clinton is a man the way a rotted plank is timber. He was a President the way a mound of dung is Mount Rushmore.
Republicans are to Democrats as the Munsters are to the tiny car packed with funnymen at the circus.
Talent is to craftsmanship as a feel for spelling is to War and Peace.
Waiting for “things to get better,” if anybody still does, is like waiting for the sun to morph into an eglantine. It’s like expecting Michael Moore to direct and personally edit Bush’s biographical tribute at the Republican Convention. It’s like waiting for Keanu Reeves to learn how to act. It’s like waiting for Katrina van den Heuvel to spend the weekend in a Motel Six with Patrick Buchanan. It’s like expecting Yassir Arafat to say, “Ech. How’s by you, Ari? Let’s put the kappore behind us and have a nosh. A leben ahf dir!”
It’s not at all a stretch to think of the Bush administration as being analogous to The Sopranos. The reason people might have trouble with this comparison is that George Bush bears no resemblance to the Hamlet-as-torpedo mob boss portrayed by James Gandolfino. But if we look a little harder at the series’ story line, the difficulty vanishes. As far as the world at large is concerned, Tony is number two in the organization, while clueless and hapless Uncle Junior is number one. So the configuration of the Bush administration conforms quite appositely after all to that of the gangland opera company benintesa: Cheney is the goombah with the stugots strategizing mayhem and perfidy in his shadowy Badda Bing lair while George Walker is the decoy for the media and the feds out front, a slightly younger Junior who knows he doesn’t truly call the shots but, well, being out front is the only piece of the Thing they’re ever going to let him have.
Hunter Thompson saying he is “really ashamed to be carrying an American passport” is like Timothy McVeigh saying (if he were still alive), “9/11 really pisses me off.”
Politics is to Bill Maher what blood was to Jack the Ripper.
Asking an American to point out instances of ethical behavior is like asking a color-blind person to identify the red things.