Ready For Her Close-Up

Slouching Towards Oblivion
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 25, 2009

Maureen Dowd continues her California vacation hunting for the perfect metaphor for the end of the newspaper industry. Being a fan of old movies, it only makes sense that she would stumble upon Sunset Boulevard, the classic Gloria Swanson movie about an aging star unwilling to adjust to the reality of a changing marketplace.

Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond.

Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.

That paraphrase of the classic line gets hammered into metaphor one more time.

...old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology.

With the Movies With Maureen® reference out of the way, she goes for the distance record for a Dowdversion™ compare/contrast. She starts with...

Journalists are still hot in Hollywood.

And an entire paragraph later sums up with...

But in real life, journalists are feeling the chill.

And to get that walking past the graveyard feeling she takes a newsroom tour with her Celebrity Quote of the week, Phil Bronstein, whose claim to fame is that his celebrity ex-wife tried to feed him to a reptile.

“This is called the Komodo Dragon Room, for obvious reasons,” he said dryly, referring to the time his ex-wife, Sharon Stone, gave him a meet-and-greet session with a Komodo dragon, who mistook his foot for a snack.

And what better metaphor could you ask for than for a denizen of the newsroom to be devoured by a dinosaur.

Road Tripping With Maureen

While Dowd Central has been shuttered for Spring Break, Maureen Dowd has taken to traveling the highways and byways of this great nation hobnobbing with the common people like Silicon Valley billionaires to get her hand on the pulse of the nation, among other places. Let's catch up on the tour and see where she's been.

Striking It Poor
JAMESTOWN, Calif. (April 8)

Single Sentence Synopsis: Panning for gold is harder than digging for quotes.
Classic Dowdism: A Movies With Maureen® Moment as she goes all Fred C. Dobbs.

I’d seen “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the 1948 classic starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston. (“Badges? ... I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”) That movie was the best meditation on prospecting for gold, and falling prey to greed, ever done — until the Bernie Madoff story.

Cocktail Reference: Ramos gin fizzes and a lemon drop martini

Amazing Insight: Her foray into Kirsten Gum territory is a bust. Maureen's going to have to find another way to fund the 401(k)

Demi in Des Moines?
SAN FRANCISCO (April 12)

Single Sentence Summary: Ames is the new Castro Street

Classic Dowdism: With Iowa allowing gay marriage, Maureen makes with the Dowdversion™.

Now it’s flyover country that’s starting high-flying trends.

Celebrity Source: Max Mutchnick, the co-creator of “Will and Grace"

Cocktail Reference: “Vitamin V” vodka

Her Amazing Insight: Gay people are just like her. Single and envious.

Dinosaur at the Gate
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (April 15)

Single Sentence Summary: Google is destroying newspapers just in time to keep Maureen from retiring in luxury.

Classic Dowdism: A double Alliteration Alert™ over Google's gameplan.

Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy.

Celebrity Source: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Cocktail Reference: Wheat-grass shots

Her Amazing Insight: The effort required to program a DowdBot is trivial, only nobody has bothered to do it yet.

The Aura of Arugulance
BERKELEY, Calif. (April 19)

Single Sentence Summary: Peace can be reached through peas.

Classic Dowdism: Quoting a coined word and making it her own.

[Alice Waters] says wryly: “I’m just put into that arugulance place..."

Celebrity Source: George Lucas (explaining that Dick Cheney is too evil to be Darth Vader, he's really the Emperor)

Her Amazing Insight: I don't know, but the column made me hungry.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet
SAN FRANCISCO (April 22)

Single Sentence Summary: Twittering is amazingly annoying, especially in column form.

Classic Dowdism: A formatting conceit that can be loosely described as clever. In this case, doing the interview in Twitter length questions and answers. Sample exchange:

ME: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?
BIZ (dryly): In the middle of what?

Celebrity Source: Biz Stone and Evan Williams, founders of Twitter.

Amazing Insight: At ages 35 and 37, the Twitterers-In-Chief are prime cougar prey.

Taken individually, these recent columns can be seen as an innocent way to expense a trip to the Left Coast. But here at Dowd Central we sniff book deal research disguised as Friedman level reporting. Can Is Silicon Valley Necessary? be far behind?

She Said 'Hummer'

No More Hummer Nation
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 31, 2009

Maureen Dowd has stumbled on a cute little portmanteau of a Crossword Clue complete with a definition she lifts straight from Wikipedia.

As President Obama renegotiates the terms of American leadership this week in Europe, those of us left at home struggle to get over our affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”

Somehow this ties into Obama's Sunday night massacre of the former GM president. Rick Wagoner was clearly in a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation.

The Wall Street Journal had an article last week reporting that, now that gas prices have gone back down, almost half a million fuel-frugal small cars are piling up unsold at dealers around the country.

And later in the column:

Wagoner showed no foresight or willingness to curb an unhealthy appetite for the big. He failed to eliminate brands and launched the Hummer line in 2001.
{snip}
Wagoner stuck to gas-guzzling pickups and S.U.V.’s long after it was clear that higher gas prices meant he should vary the fleet with more fuel-efficient vehicles.

So that they could sit around unsold when gas prices drop again. Anyone else see the fallacy here?

But it's not a Dowd column without at least one Movies With Maureen® moment.

I heard a French scientist on a radio show once explain that Americans would always insist on supersizing things because our “reptilian brain” likes things big. We’re still big, as Norma Desmond said. It’s everything around us that’s collapsing and shrinking.

And the mention of anything French sends Maureen's reptilian brain free-associating to her longstanding crush for Carla Bruni.

How big do we need to be to still feel American? How big can our national debt grow? How big can our cars be? And how big is our clout abroad these days? Will Michelle’s style in Europe make as big a splash as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s?

How many rhetorical questions can you fit in one column? At least two more.

How do we come to terms with the gluttony that exploded our economy and still retain our reptilian American desire for living large? How do we make the pursuit of the American dream a satisfying quest rather than a selfish one?

How do you fill eight hundred words when your only news pegs are a trip to the G20 summit and a fired executive? You do a fashion report.

But, hey, nobody’s perfect — except maybe Michelle Obama, who landed in London with a huge Obama entourage, wearing a daffodil yellow dress and looking like a confident ray of U.S.A. sunshine.

At least next week we will have Michelle's inappropriate hugging of the Queen to discuss.

photo from Mrs.O.org

Don't It Make Her Brown Eyes Blue

No one knows what it's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies

But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be

I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
-The Who "Behind Blue Eyes"

Blue-Eyed Greed?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 28, 2009

Maureen Dowd goes on a classic rock bender this week. The impetus is a third world dictator making some crypto-reverse-racist statements substituting eye color for skin tone.

At a press conference Thursday in Brasilia with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain — who has a talent for getting himself into dicey spots — [Brazilian president] Lula started off coughing from some cheese bread he’d wolfed down. Then he suddenly turned accusatory.

“This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing,” charged the brown-eyed, bearded socialist president.

The first classic rock allusion is just a hint at the Procul Harum signature tune.

As the brown-eyed Brown grew a whiter shade of pale, Lula hammered the obvious point that the poor of the world were suffering in the global crash because of the misdeeds of the rich.

She interrupts the flow to use her new favorite Crossword Clue® to again slap at the morals-free actions of AIG and their ilk.

And it is true, of course, that the upper-crust, underwhelming Anglo-Saxon leaders who allowed America’s financial markets to morph into louche casinos, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, were very, very white men with blue eyes.

And the blue eyes finally push her into typing out the tune cootie in her head.

As the Who sang: “No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, to be the sad man behind blue eyes. No one knows what it’s like to be hated, to be fated to telling only lies.”

And being a little more free-associative than usual she rambles past Jesus and Barbie to land on her favorite interview and Hollywood crush.

The cerulean-eyed Paul Newman once wryly predicted his epitaph: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

And it's been a while since Maureen's mother made a guest appearance with her words of wisdom. This time she comes up with a great maternal ugly duckling-beautiful swan aphorism.

I obsessed on it so much, cutting out a picture of a beautiful brown-eyed model and keeping it in my scrapbook, that my mother finally reassured me:
“You look at blue eyes. You look into brown eyes.”

And the memory of her Irish mom sends her right back to the classic rock apple crate for that Celtic crooner of the 70s.

Later, of course, there would be the thrill of Van Morrison serenading a “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

Maureen ends the column with a wistful Alliteration Alert™ that is all peace, love and understanding.

With Michelle urging students to aim for A’s and the president promising to make school “cool,” brown eyes may finally — and rightfully — overtake blue as the windows of winners.

But she could just as well have used a different Who song:

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again

Bonfire of the Bailout

Click on the image to read the revised tagline.

Toxic R Us
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 21, 2009

Maureen Dowd's fury at the titans of industry that have wrecked the economy has not abated and she blames Barack Obama for not being tougher on them. We get a nice little Dowdversion® aimed at the robber barons.

Barack Obama prides himself on consensus, soothing warring sides into agreement. But the fury directed at the robber barons by the robbed blind in America has been getting hotter, not cooler.

And she places a share of the blame on Timothy Geithner for being too cozy with the Wall Street weasels.

And that’s because the president and his Treasury secretary have been coddling the Wall Street elite, fretting that if they curtail executives’ pay and perks too much, if they make the negotiations with those who siphoned our 401(k)’s too tough, the spoiled Sherman McCoys will run away, the rescue plan will fail and the markets will wither.

Sherman McCoy is the famously benighted and clueless hero of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities made into a bad, bad movie starring Tom Hanks. And as part of the Movies Wiht Maureen®, she takes from the film one of its catch phrases only substituting 'shafters' with 'masters'.

The shafters of the universe have been treated with such kid gloves that they remain obnoxiously oblivious.

Ending that line with an Alliteration Alert™. And she says Geithner is a little to sympathetic to said masters.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who grew up as a Republican and was head of the New York Fed for five years, sees things from the point of view of that wellspring of masters of the universe, Goldman Sachs.

In the bonuses, Maureen sees not only bad movies about the excess of greed, but also a fair amount of the theater of the absurd, citing its premiere writer.

Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance behemoth that had $59 billion in losses last year when the government was forced to take it over, and since has asked for $15 billion in taxpayer money, brazenly intends to give $1 million apiece in retention bonuses to four top executives, even though the word retention in a depression is pure Ionesco.

My guess is that her favorite play of his is La Lacune or maybe Frenzy for Two or More.

And it wouldn't be a decent Dowd rant on corporate excess without a Bling Report©:

Vikram “Pandit the Bandit” at Citigroup, which received $50 billion in bailout money, is pulling a Thain, spending $10 million to renovate his Park Avenue offices, complete with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and premium millwork (whatever that is).

While the grifters are remodeling in New York, the gardeners are planting an upscale vegetable patch at the White House.

It’s an image that could have come straight out of a McCain campaign ad: Barack Obama growing organic arugula at the White House.

But there was Michelle on Friday, the first day of spring, with a bunch of fifth graders, digging a veggie garden on the South Lawn.

Dowd says that perhaps Barack Obama needs the weapon Michelle is wielding.

The tableau of Michelle Obama hoisting a pitchfork on Friday with her sinewy arms and warning that the commander in chief would be commandeered into yard work left me wondering if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.

I can hear the howls now that Maureen is again emasculating Obama. But until he plants some blame on the bonus babies, he is going to keep getting rolled. Maybe Maureen can talk Michelle into taking a break from gardening and marching pitchfork in hand on the masters of the bailout.

Darby O'Gall

No Boiled Carrots
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 17, 2009

Like a good Irish lass, Maureen took St. Paddy’s Day off, but it was a working holiday for her as she covered Obama’s latest address on the financial bail-outs.

On St. Patrick’s Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.

Gawker notes that the Moneygall pun was used in her Irish Times interview, but in these tough economic times, who can blame her for a little recycling. She continues with the Blarney theme with an extended leprechaun metaphor.

But Mr. Obama is still having trouble summoning a suitable flash of Irish temper at the gall of the corrupt money magicians who continue to make our greenbacks disappear into their bottomless well.

And she digs into her well of quaint sayings from the Old Sod to quote her Irish dad:

[Obama] should keep in mind one of my dad’s favorite Gaelic sayings: “Never bolt the door with a boiled carrot.”

Now there is a mental image for the ages. Normally, this is a carrot and stick metaphor, but the executive excesses have got her blood boiling. And while other columnists are content to brandish pitchforks, Maureen has the oxcarts rolling up to the guillotine.

He’s got to lop off some heads.
{snip}
Mr. Obama belatedly tried to stop the tumbrels that began rolling toward the Potomac after Larry Summers went on Sunday talk shows to assert that there was nothing the administration could do about the blood-sucking insurance monstrosity’s venal payout.

Summers, who inspires lusty dreams of A.I.G. tormentor Eliot Spitzer, asserted that the government “cannot just abrogate” contracts with financial vampires.

All this blood sucking and carrots makes be think of Bunnicula.

What President Obama should have said to the blood-sucking bums at A.I.G., many of them foreigners who were working at the louche London unit, was quite simple: “We stopped the checks. They’re immoral. If you want Americans’ hard-earned cash as a reward for burning up their jobs, homes and savings, sue me.”

Which rolls right into the combo Alliteration Alert™ and Crossword Clue® since 'louche' not only fits well with London but also means 'immoral'. One thing this crisis is doing, it’s making Maureen dig deeper into her thesaurus than ever. She's as mad as hell and she's willing to make the March Madness metaphor to prove it.

[Obama's] lofty team of economic rivals is looking more like a team of small forwards and shooting guards.

And there is nothing a righteous financial fury to make Dowd get her Irish up.

Maureen The Irish Rose

In honor of St Patricks Day, Maureen Dowd gave an interview with her sister to the Irish Times website. She also unearthed this photo of her at the age of two that appeared in the Washington Post. What a cute shamrock on her dress.

In the article, she talks about the Irish lad that got away:

Somewhere in Australia there's an Irish lad called Rowan McCormick who broke Maureen Dowd's heart. When she went back in the early 1970s to visit her homestead in County Clare, hard by the majestic Cliffs of Moher, she met him and fell madly in love.

{snip}

Sadly, like most summer romances, Dowd’s didn’t work out, and her beau departed for Australia. But when she was Down Under a few years back on a book tour she put out an all points bulletin and he came running.

Alas, he was married now and settled down. Dowd still sounds disappointed.

The Dowd patriarch nearly didn't make it to America from Ireland:

Michael from Clare was the son of a poor farmer in a poor country, the second child in the family named Michael after the first died. He was booked on the Titanic in 1914, but his mother cried all night and he couldn’t leave her.

Once in America, her dad became a cop that hung around a neighborhood bar (no Irish stereotypes at work there) where he found love:

The cop and the barkeep's daughter were both champion Irish step dancers. In 1934 they married; the age difference was 18 years. They raised five kids together – Maureen, the youngest, Michael, Martin, Kevin and Peggy.

From her mother's side, angry politics runs in Maureen's blood:

Her mother was an Irish rebel. In the 1970s Peggy Dowd led a demonstration at the British Embassy after Bloody Sunday when 14 were shot by British forces in Derry. To her eternal satisfaction the then British ambassador had to sneak in through the underground garage.

A tradition she carries on:

The old Irish rebel still lives on in the daughter. Mike Quill, the great union leader and 1920s IRA activist, is alleged to have told the immigration man letting him into America that, “if there’s a government here I’m against it.” Sometimes it seems Maureen feels that way too.

Ain't that the truth. So on this Saint Paddy's Day, raise a pint and toast "Maureen Go Bragh!"