Politics: “Oh Wow, Oh Wow…Oops”
And Other Yakety Yak From 2011
“A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad,” tweeted Sohaib Athar in the wee hours of May 2. “I hope it’s not the start of something nasty.”
It was for his unfortunate neighbors in a certain nearby compound. Unbeknownst to him, Athar was inadvertently live-tweeting the year’s most notable event, the raid that took out World Enemy No. 1.
If I were in his shoes, Jordan’s King Abdullah said of Syrian thug-tator Bashar al-Assad, I would step down. A tide of 4,000+ (to date) martyred protesters’ blood rising all around him, al-Assad still stubbornly grips power. But here’s where other deposed Arab dictators are at year’s end: Tunisia’s Ben Ali, in Saudi Arabian exile. Egypt’s Mubarak, in police custody at a military hospital. Libya’s Gaddafi, in a grave.
Alas, progress: Saudi King Abdullah granted women the right to vote – but not until 2015.
Not the pope’s best year: The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Benedict for crimes against humanity. Amnesty International wrote up the Vatican for the first time in its annual human rights report: “The Holy See did not sufficiently comply with its international obligations relating to the protection of children.” What’s new?
After a two-year study, University of California at Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, once a climate change skeptic, changed his mind: “Global warming is real.” Try convincing most of the GOP presidential field of that. Herman Cain, formerly of that field, was asked in an interview if he has a “roaming eye”: “I enjoy flowers like everybody else.” Thanks to that eye – and perhaps other body parts and biological urges of his – he now has a lot more free time to stop and smell the daisies.
The year’s most remarkable tremor in the financial world was not set off by the milquetoast Occupy Wall Street lollygags in their tent encampments and drum circles, but by one lone dissident with a laptop. You may not have heard of Molly Katchpole until now, but you have her to thank for why your bank balance is more, not less, this holiday season: The 22-year-old college student (think “David”) started an online, 300,000 signature-strong petition (think “slingshot”) against Bank of America’s planned $5 monthly debit-card fee. “Goliath” soon caved in and abandoned the fee.
Occupy Wall Street, your turn.
Perhaps Starbucks should have paid closer attention to the card fee controversy: The coffee chain got caught tagging its customers with a hidden fee ($1.50) for bagged java. Massachusetts cracked down and Starbucks ‘fessed up and eliminated the fee altogether. The lesson here? Stick to brewing up coffee, not sneaky overcharges.
An even bigger gamble than Genting’s $400 million bet to bring casino gambling to Miami? Try Scottish oil-and-gas exploration company Cairn Energy, who spent $600 million to drill for oil in the Arctic. Their find? Not a drop.
Religionists run amok: A Brooklyn ultra-orthodox Hasidic paper ran that now-famous pic of Obama and his national security team huddled around a conference table awaiting news on the bin Laden raid. But the images of Hillary Clinton and another woman? Cropped out. Judaic “laws of modesty” was editors’ excuse. Harold Camping, 90-year-old dumb fart, foretold the world’s end on May 21. Nineteen days later, suffering a stroke, he nearly came to his own end. This, however, did not short-circuit the idiot lobe of his brain: He merely recalculated doomsday as Oct. 21.
Upheld by the Supreme Court: The right of the Rev. Fred Phelps-led lunatic fringe Westboro Baptist Church to picket military funerals with signs that read THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS and GOD HATES AMERICA. Margie, Fred’s daughter, announced via Twitter a picketing of Steve Jobs’s funeral because he “spent his days teaching sin” and was now in hell for it.
The tweet came from her iPhone.
“We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” declared the president, producing his long-form birth certificate in hopes of shutting up the conspiracy theory crackpots who screech that he isn’t a natural-born citizen. Tea Party twit shits (and the Republicans who suck up to them) no doubt will find other silliness to embrace. With 44 weeks to Election Day, there’s more than enough time.
A Tale of Two Coaches: Duke’s men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski notched 903 career wins, becoming the winning-est men’s coach in Division 1 history. His Division 1 winning-est football counterpart, Penn State’s Joe Paterno (409 wins) saw his storied, 46-year career implode in the most unforeseen, ignominious of ways.
Evidence that some educators need a spanking, whether politically-correct or not: A Detroit seventh-grader, 12, stretching in class, accidentally touched her teacher, who happened to be behind her. For this, she was hit with a 180-day suspension. Somebody deserves to be hit all right.
Famous last words: Steve Jobs, before dying: “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.” Rick Perry, as the last of whatever serious chance he had to be president dribbled away: “Oops.”
My vote for the year’s best book title: Levi Johnston’s Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. And for the truest utterance of the year? Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” Checkmate!
So, humans are the smartest animal? Really? A Colombian soccer player kicked an owl, the mascot of a rival team, when it flew onto the field in the middle of a match. He later apologized, claiming he wasn’t trying to hurt the bird, only wanted “to see if it would fly.” The owl, which went into shock after it was taken in for treatment, died. An unlicensed Hialeah slaughterhouse was shut down, its butcher-owners arrested. On surveillance video: 600 livestock, in cramped, unsanitary conditions, and often sledgehammered to death.
Goodbye to the eastern cougar. Endangered since 1973, it was declared extinct in 2011 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
To the numbers: A ’57 Ferrari fetched the highest price for an auction-sold car, $16.4 million. A 200-year-old bottle of white wine was sold for a record $117,000. Elizabeth Taylor’s funeral began 15 minutes late, in keeping with Liz’s final wishes. Said her publicist: “She even wanted to be late for her own funeral.” Ida Keeling, of the Bronx, set a world record of running 60 meters in under 30 seconds. At 95, she’s the oldest woman to do so.
For 472 consecutive weeks, the weekly AP college football top-25 poll contained at least one Florida team. That is, until the 29-year streak ended this season. The weight of a deer eaten whole by a 16-ft. Burmese python? 76 lbs. (An Everglades python.) One in 4 baby boomers polled say they’ll never retire; almost the same number say they have nothing saved for retirement. Another reason to fear the roads: 30% of under-30 drivers, according to Consumer Reports, said they sent text messages while driving within the last month.
The worst thief of all is Death, whose crimes are more unfair and incomprehensible when the life that’s stolen is as young and tender as Christina Taylor Green’s. The aspiring politician had recently been elected to the student council of her Tucson elementary school. An A student. A Kids Helping Kids charity volunteer. She wanted to grow up to be the first woman to play major league baseball. On a Saturday morning in January, the third-grader waited with others outside a supermarket to meet their congresswoman, Gabby Giffords. “She was all about helping people and being involved. She went to learn,” explained her mother.
Christina, who came into the world on the day of another tragedy, 9/11, was just 9.
“I think there’s been a lot of hatred going on,” Mrs. Green told a newspaper the day her little girl was murdered, “and it needs to stop.”
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, Elvis declared. Take out the papers and the trash, commanded the Coasters. Yakety yak, don’t talk back. Jerry Leiber, 78, put lyrics like those in their mouths. Children’s author Dick King-Smith, 88, put words into the mouth of a pig who learned to herd sheep; a film star (Babe) was born. Screenwriter Madelyn Pugh Davis, 90, put words into the mouths of Ricky and Lucy Ricardo every week on I Love Lucy.
Were there a dictionary image for the term “public service,” it would have to be the face of Sargeant Shriver, 95. The Peace Corps, Head Start, the Special Olympics – such, and more, is his legacy to the nation. Author/activist Stetson Kennedy, 94, infiltrated the KKK and ripped the white hood away, revealing the Klan’s secrets to all.
Bill Haast, 100, founded the Miami Serpentarium, to which guests paid admission to watch him extract snake venom for research. Milton Levine, 97, handled a much less-dangerous creature. He sold 20 million Uncle Milton’s Ant Farms as educational toys. The tunneling ants’ most amazing feat, he liked to say, was putting his three kids through college.
Harry Wesley Coover, Jr., 94, held 460 patents in his lifetime, but it was his invention of Super Glue that sealed his place in fame. Advertising copywriter John Chervokas, 74, asked us “please don’t squeeze the Charmin.” Betty Skelton Erde, 85, the auto industry’s first female test driver and the “fastest woman on Earth,” set speed records that proved it. Australian Claude Choules, 110, was the last known combat vet from the War to End All Wars.
Poet/musician Gil Scott-Heron, 62, penned, “The revolution will not be televised.” He wrote this in 1970, long before the dawn of the Age of Twitter, when – now – just a single tweet can rally revolutionaries by the thousands to a Tahrir Square (Cairo), or a Martyrs’ Square (Tripoli), to topple a regime. Or, like Sohaib Athar’s, can herald the capture and death of an international terrorist holed up in a compound, the successful hunt-down of whom renewed the affirmation – for a world breathing a collective sigh of relieve for the first time since that god-awful September morning he orchestrated a decade ago – that good eventually does triumph over evil.
The start of something nasty? No. The start of what one hopes will be a more peaceful, tranquil new year. Amen.
Correction to last week’s column Here, in its entirety, is the Hitchens quote about Newt Gingrich: “He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his office; he has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his skull.”
