I remember when I was a kid, we had a snowday at school and so Brian and Brett Lofgren and I decided to trek all the way through the woods to the Bryn Athen Cathedral where they had the best sledding in four counties.* When we got there, the snow hadn’t really been packed down enough for good sledding, so we turned around and walked all the way back. All in all we must have dragged our sleds four miles through the snow.
It wasn’t that big a deal until we got back to the Lofgrens. While we were out, some embattled state staffer named Budd Dwyer gave a press conference which culminated with his pulling a gun from a manilla envelope and blowing his head off on live teevee. By the time we had returned, the televsion stations were replaying the scene repeatedly up to the point just before he shot himself, where they would stop the video. This was equivelent to torturing a fourteen year old boy.# What made the situation worse was the next day in school, almost everybody else in my class had seen the suicide except me.##
After the suicide a number of jokes circulated, such as:
What did Budd Dwyers’ wife tell him before he went to the press conference?
Now don’t go shooting your mouth off.
There was also a joke about his head “popping” off, which I was reminded of earlier today when I heard about that Saddam Hussein crony, whose head, I guess, popped off during his hanging. There have been a lot of heads rolling since the war started. It’s like a general theme. In the future, the Geist in the zeitgeist will be headless, much like the one that plagued Ichibod Crain, or Crane, whatever.
That’s one of the many reasons why I am opposed to the death penalty. Can you imagine pulling the floor from beneath some dude and the next thing you know his head has popped off? It happens so fast, the relationships of causes and effects, so much so that I would hope to imagine that you couldn’t help but feel responsible. I mean there’s no excuse like, ‘He had a skinny neck,’ or something like that. When that guy’s head pops off, no matter what he did to’deserve’ it, you’ve gone too far.
And there are those who will say that he gassed a bunch of people, and that is pretty gruesome and nasty as well. If you’ve seen the pictures, or heard the stories about what it was like to be in one of those villages that got gassed, it’s absolutely horrific. By the time the gasser is apprehended and brought to the scaffold though, he has become a different person. It’s one thing to murder a person filled with enough venom to gas a village, it’s another to kill a scared old man with a skinny neck. Just like it’s one thing to go big game hunting and shoot a murderous rampaging elephant and another thing to blow away zebras at the zoo. I know this is being idealistic, but I think it is far less idealistic than thinking that the death penalty in any way shape or form absolves humanity of some type of evil. For the record, I hate idealism in general.
FORD COMMERCIAL / MY MISTAKES
I was rewatching that Ford commercial this weekend, and it turns out I was wrong about a number of details. For one thing, it seems like it takes place at night, but when they open the barn doors, the morning light comes streaming through, as if to signal some type of divination. I also noticed that there are a number of welders and other worker guys milling around as the giant metal thing is placed on the truck. One final note, I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I do know that in my memory, I recalled the truck driving out of a red barn in the end, but it is really a barn-esque building made of what apperas to be corrugated steel.
At this point not even I can trust anything I say.
Or maybe Ford changed the ad after they read my entry making fun of them in an effort to make me look bad.
* Unfounded exargeration to give story a rural nostalgic feel
# For Brian Lofgren and I, a similar instance of feeling jilted by the media had occured late in 1980 when we both received the record “The Phantastic Phillies” for Christmas. At the end of the Phillies World Series Victory Parade, the players and coaches all gave speeches in a packed J.F.K. Stadium, the most memorable being Tug McGraw’s, “All through baseball history, Philadelphia’s had to take the back seat to New York city. Well, New York City can take this World Series and stick it! ‘Cause we’re number one!” When the record came out, McGraw’s speech, a priceless thing to have an audio recording of in those days before VCR’s and so forth, had been crudely edited to “”All through baseball history, Philadelphia’s had to take the back seat to New York city. Well, New York City, today is our day.” The record’s other drawback is that it purports to have all of the highlights of the 1980 season, but in 1980, local broadcasters were unable to do the post season, so basically, once the playoffs start (side two), the record becomes Harry Kalas pretending to announce the games live, while it’s painfully obvious that he’s in a studio somewhere with piped in fan noise.
## The happy ending to this part of the story is that years later, thanks to Youtube…