MIKE GOLD: Dangerous Old Farts
Our popular culture likes to mock young celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and that Federline guy. That’s fine; there’s no reason to take our celebrities seriously. But I think we’re showing our ageist leanings by making it look like these children differ from their parents and grandparents. There are a lot of old fogies up to no damn good, and they deserve to be outed as well.
For example, last week actor Bill Murray was arrested for DWI. While driving a golf cart. Down the middle of a public road. In Sweden. As it turns out, he “borrowed” the golf cart from Stockholm’s Café Opera, although the owner is not pressing charges. In fact, he’s milking it for all it’s worth.
Well, Lenny Bruce pointed out society perceives a difference between dirty screwing and fancy screwing, and I’ve got to admit, getting busted for driving a golf cart down the middle of a public road in downtown Stockholm is fancy screwing. Or it’s the plot to one of Murray’s earlier movies; it’s kind of hard to tell.
William Shatner evolved from the butt of jokes to my personal hero. Nobody has turned his image around like Bill, thanks to a wonderful self-effacing sense of humor and a great role in Boston Legal, an amazingly iconoclastic teevee series. But even Bill has his meltdowns.
At a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas Hilton earlier this month, Shatner publicly railed against producer J.J. Abrams for casting Leonard Nimoy in next year’s Star Trek movie – but not him. According to the New York Daily News, “Shatner was so manic onstage that Leonard Nimoy actually said, ‘We’re worried about you.’”
Then there’s George W. Bush. He’s always good for a few laughs. Rick Oliver, my old friend and successor as First Comics’ EIC, sent along this priceless quote: “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields…’”
So much for “no child left behind.” George’s reference to the killing fields had nothing to do with Vietnam; that was Cambodia, under the petit-Hitler Pol Pot. Proportionately speaking, he was the greatest monster of the 20th Century, having slaughtered through slave labor, malnutrition, poor medical care and execution some two million of his people – fully one-third of Cambodia’s population.
Pot’s killing fields and re-education camps were brought to an end in 1979 by the Vietnamese – the same Commies Bush and his friends like to point to as an excuse for their continued gang-rape of Iraq. For the record, the world has the Vietnamese to thank for putting his career to an end. Pol Pot was kept under close house arrest for twenty years, until the day he died.
Nice going, Georgie. In comparison, President Paris Hilton doesn’t sound so bad.
Or should that be President Freedom Hilton?
Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.com.
Twenty-five years ago, the late, great Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, tried to beat Lord of the Rings to the cinematic punch by co-writing and co-directing a similar and derivative, yet pioneering and daring, “adult” fantasy. Four years after that, approximately twenty-one years ago, he tried to combine Star Wars, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Where the Wild Things Are, and M.C. Escher, among other things, to create a new coming of age teen tale.
He seemed to have little choice, of course, since his chosen medium was the puppet, and, back in the 80s he was limited to what those puppets could achieve, no matter how hard he pushed their envelope. What these new DVDs have over his old movies is that very knowledge. Once a viewer knows how hard he tried and how much work was put into pulling the difficult concepts off, new admiration for the attempts, if not the finished products, is hard to suppress.
Everyone around my age seems to have a Twilight Zone episode that sticks with them the most. For me, it’s the Burgess Meredith-starring "
The Chicago Tribune‘s 
I should warn you about these link-lists: Mondays tend to be longer than usual (since there’s a lot of content that goes up on the weekend, or early on Monday), and the beginning of the month tends to be longer than usual. Since we’re just past both of those things, this is going to be a really long one…
