Sin City

Everyone I know has been telling me for months I needed to see this film. They were right. This is the movie for people who didn't think Kill Bill was over the top enough. Hyper-dark, hyper-violent, hyper-sexual. Whaddya want? It's a comic book...sorry, graphic novel...brought to life.

I'll See You In Hell

Duane Swierczynski first turned me on to this 50's pulp classic via his blog. Then he solidified his position as one of the Princes of Cool by mailing his copy to me when I expressed an interest. (This is particularly impressive because the paperback's in that dry-leaf, just-about-to fall-apart-at-the-spine condition that made me reluctant to leave it on the kitchen counter, much less abandon it to the tender mercies of the USPS. (Not to worry, Duane; I treated it with the reverence it deserves).

I just finished it, and the verdict is: this book rocks. It's got a tough, honorable hero, beautiful and highly treacherous dames, and a sadistic psycho sheriff who has to be one of the great villains of all time. He's so compelling, in fact, that, like Satan in Paradise Lost, he almost overshadows the hero. There's also a twist ending that rivals The Maltese Falcon in its irony. I'll See You In Hell could serve as the prototype for redneck noir. Thanks, Duane, for the inspiration.

ARRRRH!

Once again, Talk Like A Pirate Day is upon us. Scurvy dogs and lusty wenches are invited to participate. Landlubbers needs not apply.

Arrrrh! Where's me rum?!

Find your pirate name here.

I be named Drakken the Awful, do yer wants to fight about it!?

Republicans Look for a Katrina Corpse to Politicize

Outrageous.

Sluice Tundra: The Case of the Missing President

Latest Newspaper Column . For those of you unfamiliar with my hardboiled sleuth Sluice Tundra, other columns featuring him are available here, here, and here.

Outside the window, a heavy rain was falling. I took another sip from the bottle of Old Overshoe I keep in my desk for medicinal purposes and looked out the window, watching the rain.

There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” I called out.

There were three of them, dressed in suits and ties. They were classier than the usual run of client that came through my door. Older, better dressed. “Are you Mr. Tundra?” one of them asked. He looked to be the oldest.

“Could be,” I said, “depending on who wants to know.”

“We’re clients,” the old guy said. “Paying ones.”

“Then I’m Sluice Tundra, Private Eye,” I replied quickly. “An honest gumshoe, out there on the mean streets, where the hot lead flies and justice is dispensed at the end of a fist …” I trailed off. They were looking at me expectantly. “Yes?” the old guy said.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “Most people don’t let me get that far. I don’t really have an ending to it.”

“Yes. Well.” The old guy said, “My friends and I have a job for you. We want you to find out what happened to this man.” He placed a photograph face up on my battered desktop. I picked up the photo and wiped the batter off.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is George W. Bush.”

“That’s right.”

“The president of the United States.”

“Exactly.”

“Well … have you looked in the White House?”

“Mr. Tundra,” the old guy said heavily, “that man in the White House is not the man we voted for.”

“What do you mean?”

“We voted for a man who would be a strong and decisive leader in times of crisis. We voted for the man who we thought would keep us safer. The man in the White House dithered around for days on his vacation, eating cake with John McCain, pushing his Medicare plan, and playing a guitar some country singer gave him, all while a massive hurricane trashed the Southern U.S. The man we voted for was honest and forthright. This man in the White House let his people claim that the delayed disaster response was because the governor of Louisiana never asked for help until it was too late.”

“Which as it turns out,” I said helpfully, “was a total lie, according to the Congressional Research Service.”

The old guy didn’t seem to hear me. “The man we voted for,” he went on, “was going to be a wartime president who would lead us to victory over terrorism. The man in the White House has us bogged down in a seemingly endless operation that keeps producing more casualties and creating more terrorists.

“We voted for a man who had a clear vision. The man in the White House keeps telling us to ‘stay the course,’ but he won’t tell us what the course is, or when we can say we’ve arrived. We voted for a Republican, because the Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility. The man in the White House spends money like a drunken sailor in a Bangkok brothel and keeps running up huge deficits while cutting taxes.” He slammed his hand down on the desk. “This can only mean one thing.”

“You were duped by the most shameless con man since P.T. Barnum?”

“No. The man claiming to be the president of the United States is not the man we voted for. Somewhere after the re-election, he was replaced by an imposter.”

“Sorry, pops,” I said. I turned back to the window and took another long drink of whiskey. “I can’t help you. Some of us tried to tell you all through the last election that the Emperor George had no clothes, that he was a mean-spirited hack whose only real agenda was creating power for himself and his party. The guy sitting in the White House is exactly the guy you voted for, because you thought it was funny to wear fake purple band-aids to mock John Kerry for not being wounded badly enough in Vietnam.”

I stopped. The three men couldn’t hear me. They had put their hands over their ears and were chanting, “Liberal. Jane Fonda. Michael Moore. Liberal. Jane Fonda. Michael Moore.” As one, they turned and began marching out. I sighed and turned back to the window. After a moment, however, I heard the door open again. It was the youngest of the three guys who had just left.

“So…” he said hesitantly, “what can we do?”

I shrugged. “There’s an election next year,” I said. “You can elect people who’ll stand up to him, who won’t rubber stamp everything just because it’s demanded by King George.”

He thought about that for a moment, then his face brightened. “Thanks!” he said.

“No thanks necessary,” I said, “I’m just Sluice Tundra, an honest gumshoe, out here on the…”

But he had already left. It was just as well. Some day, I’m really going to have to figure out an end to that bit.

Ask Not for Whom the Buck Stops

My latest newspaper column. I didn't post a link to the paper's website this time. For some reason, they dropped a sentence out about Brown being called back to Washington. This made the rest of the paragraph make no sense whatsoever. Of course, since the column ran, "Brownie" has gone from the "guy who's doing a heck of a job" to the "guy who's looking for a job."

President Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk that said “The Buck Stops Here.” Truman, who got his first leadership experience as an artillery commander, realized and accepted one of the burdens of leadership: if something goes wrong, it’s the guy at the top who gets the blame. It’s the same principle by which ship captains are the ones cashiered when the vessel runs aground, even if they were having coffee in the galley at the time.

Well, Harry’s dead, God rest him, and apparently so is any notion of buck-stoppage at the top. Hurricane Katrina had barely stopped its spin before Karl Rove and the White House PR machine started theirs. Message One since the devastation of Katrina became apparent is this: There’s plenty of blame to go around, but none of it goes to George Dubbya Bush.

The President finally admitted that the response after the hurricane was “not adequate.” Outside of the Washington Beltway, this is the type of statement that would lead one to respond, “no [bad word], Sherlock.” The screw-ups here are almost beyond comprehension. FEMA had to be told by a CNN reporter that people were stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center. The city of Chicago offered “hundreds of personnel, including firefighters and police, and dozens of vehicles to assist.” FEMA said “no thanks.” WalMart donated truckloads of bottled water. FEMA turned them away. None of this, however, can be traced to the guy at the top, even though it was the President who named a FEMA director whose main claim to fame had been that he was a college buddy of the old director and that he’d been the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. Bush is The Boss, until it’s time for accountability.

So let’s all chip in, pull together, and come up with some other slogan to put on a nameplate on Bush’s desk. How about:

• “Wow, I Didn’t See That Coming”: On September 1, Dubbya stated on Good Morning America that “I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." This slogan is probably the odds-on favorite. After all, it’s a time-tested winner for the Bushistas. Remember the pronouncement by the Administration after 9/11 that no one could have anticipated that Osama bin Laden would stage a major terrorist attack in the U.S. (even though there was a presidential briefing paper titled “bin Laden determined to attack in U.S.”)? Fact is, people had been saying for years that even a Category Three storm would overtop the levees that hold the water out of New Orleans. They even ran a simulation last year where a fictional Category Three storm named Hurricane Pam hit, resulting in a breach of the levees. The director of the National Hurricane Center briefed President Bush and FEAM director Michael Brown about the possibility as early as Sunday afternoon, before the hurricane even made landfall, according to stories in the St. Petersburg Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. But hey, the President didn’t think…well, come to think of it, we might as well just leave it there.
• “We’ll Look Into That and Get Back to You.” It’s another time-tested dodge of the Bushistas. From the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to the use of government funds to pay journalists to shill for the Administration, from the leak of the identity of a covert CIA operative for political payback to the current debacle in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the refrain has become so familiar that we can almost sing along with it: “we're going to make sure we find out what the facts were and what went wrong.” Of course, no one ever does. On Tuesday the President indicated that there would be an investigation into what went wrong, led by…the President. Don’t you feel better now?
• “Problem? What Problem?” FEMA is the organization to whom we’ll be turning if the terrorists really do pull of a nuclear or biological attack. And it’s looking like Michael “Brownie” Brown, the political appointee who heads up the Agency, was absolutely the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. But not to hear Dubbya tell it. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” he said at one of his after-the-deluge media events. This was before Brown was taken off the Katrina job entirely and sent back to Washington. Of course with this Administration’s record for rewarding spectacular failures, Brown’s probably going back because he’s on the shortlist for the Supreme Court. Perhaps the most stunning example of Republicans in denial, however, came from Dubbya’s mom, former First Lady Barbara Bush. While touring the enormous refugee camp that was once the Houston Astrodome, Babs chuckled—and I’m not exaggerating, I’ve heard it, the woman was actually chortling: “so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this, this is working very well for them.” Yeah, Babs, they’re dancing for joy.

Of course, these are just a few ideas off the top of my head. If you have ideas, send them in to this newspaper. As for me, I’m working on spreading my own slogan: “Total Republican Control: How’s That Workin’ For Ya?”

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage. He recognizes only one man as The Boss, and that’s Bruce Springsteen.