for 15 July 1998. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Hypatia,

Does it strike you as odd
that the news about Lyndon
Johnson's amazing disregard
for America, Vietnam, ethics,
and, ultimately, for 58,000
American boys and God only
knows how many Vietnamese, is
still not nearly as
interesting to the American
media as the Clinton-Lewinsky
peccadillo?

The most irritating
thing about the
Lewinsky matter is that it is
self-perpetuating. Married
men are supposed to lie about
their extramarital affairs,
and they're not supposed to
be questioned publicly about
them. Frankly, it's nobody's
business. So, you ask a
married man about an affair
and he denies having it - of
course. So you go and ask all
his friends and her friends
about it, and he starts trying
to cover his tracks. So then
you get him on the cover-up
(obstruction of justice -
does justice insist on
knowing everything about an
individual's sex life?)
saying that's what the real
issue is, without ever
questioning why he should be
defending himself against
this type of personal attack
in the first place.

On the other hand, we have an
ex-president who started a
war for the sake of political
expediency, and he still can't
knock Monica off the front
pages. What a crazy,
backward, small-minded
country we live in, where a
blow job is more interesting
to the people than the truth
about a war.

Steve Harrison
<sharris@rfc.com>

Correction: A blow job is
more interesting to people
than just about anything.

Hit and Run

Subject: Patricia Smith

OK, I've heard the "I'm soooo
shocked! Who could have
guessed she was making it
up?" cries about a hundred
times by the pseudo-pundits
in the media. But guess who
wasn't shocked to
learn that Patricia Smith
was faking? Me, a nobody
child therapist in Worcester,
who "knows nothing" about the
great matters of the fourth
estate!

I glanced at a copy of The
Boston Globe, laying on a
friend's table a few weeks
before the brouhaha, and
scanned a Patricia Smith
column about some supposed
African-American women doing
a young girl's hair for
church on Sunday morning. It
was so syrupy and wistful I
almost gagged. I read the
supposed conversation and
said to myself, "This is
bullshit. People don't talk
like this. Is this supposed
to be real?" I decided
Patricia Smith was another
liberal mealy-mouthed yum-yum
who feeds the white
suburbanites their feel-good
articles with a smattering of
guilt trips with coffee
for their daily angst and that
she definitely belongs at
the Globe. And I reinforced
my repulsion of that bastion
of Haaaahvard
intellectualism.

And then I found out that
the article was a fake. The
biggest surprise to me was
not that she was caught, but
that the Globe squealed on
her. Word must have gotten
out, and they were afraid of
getting exposed. No, I'm not
cynical, just been around the
track a few times.

Peter Fay
Worcester, MA
<pfay@tiac.net>

Since when has having been around
the track a few times not
rendered a person cynical, if
not significantly winded?
Why, in this crazy, false
world, is being cynical such
an insult?

We're waiting for cynicism to
be listed as an "un-American
activity" so we can get
grilled on national TV. Also,
that ice water always looks
so delicious....

Dear Sucksters,

Despite your
wittier-than-though piece
tearing down The Truman Show
as a cheap rip-off of
everything that has come
before it, I still think it
is one of the best movies to
come out in the '90s. Here
are some reasons why:

1. If you looked hard enough,
you could find the plot of
any movie repeated somewhere
else. For instance, take Wag
the Dog, which I'm sure your
politically astute writers
gushed over. It had actually
come out several years before
... under the title Canadian
Bacon. Here's the difference
though: Canadian Bacon was a
poorly written movie, so no
one really bothered to pay
attention to it. Wag the
Dog, on the other hand, was
not only better written but
much more timely. The same is
true for The Truman Show. And
that brings me to point number two.

2. Timeliness. The Real
World, Jerry Springer, and
other television crapulence
has people begging to be
entertained by other people's
problems. The so-called
news broadcast every day on
television is no better, with
its constant coverage of
sensational stories, such as
Princess Diana's "murder at
the hands of the paparazzi"
and, of course, Zippergate.
Actual consequential news has
been taken over by
second-rate entertainment.
Consequently, The Truman
Show is able to sum up many
of the problems of our
media-driven society.

3. I just think it's amusing
hearing the occasional idiot
come out of the theater
saying, "What good was that
movie? Jim Carrey didn't talk
out of his ass!"

At any rate, my point is that
brilliant originality is not
always necessary or even
present in fiction. The
Truman Show was able to
rehash an old concept in a
way that makes the audience
actually think, and that is
its strength.

Jeremy Clymer
<jclymer@clarku.edu>

If originality were a
prerequisite for quality, and
(more important) quality
were a prerequisite for
popularity, (1) We'd be out of
work, (2) Hollywood would look
like Death Valley, and (3)
Camille Paglia would be
elected president.

When did suck start getting
so hot under the collar about
stealing ideas? So someone
makes a hit movie and people
who had a similar idea come
out of the woodwork to jump
on the bandwagon, crying
"Stop! Thief!" As Willy the
Shake said so many centuries
ago, there's nothing new
under the sun, and if a
corporation collected
royalties for all the times
he's been ripped off, it
would dominate the galaxy
several times over.

The premise of The Truman
Show is as old as humans
telling tales: Someone gets a
burr under the saddle and
decides there might be a
world worth looking at beyond
the confines of the one they
grew up in. They try to leave
and meet resistance. Roughly
1.8 billion stories are
founded on this idea - only
the situations change. It may
be a shitty movie, or you may
think it's just super-duper,
but who cares if it's
original?

Maybe you should vomit all
over Armageddon for the same
reason - after all, the Bible
had stories of the apocalypse
2,000 years ago.

Lantz Hawthorne
<lantez@email.msn.com>

Um. The point was that the
critics are proclaiming The
Truman Show the most fresh,
explosively original movie in
the history of Hollywood. Or
maybe that was just Joel
Siegal.

C'mon guys, you know you had
to get an unhappy response
from this one. Describing the
US military as "a class of
handsomely paid welfare
recipients whose only purpose
is to defend us from Costa
Rican aggression" is just a
bit narrow-minded. Do you
really think our defense
forces are unnecessary? We
should disband them then, and
let any two-bit third-world
army waltz right on in to
Washington, DC? See how long
your webzine is allowed to
exist once a less tolerant
government is in place. This
is, of course, a worst-case
scenario - you guys off the
Web. You only piss me off
once in a long while. The
rest of the time, I laugh my
ass off. Keep up the (mostly)
good work.

Rich
<av8r@usa.net>

The government loves Suck,
you know why? Because Suck
loves the government! That's
right - We (heart) The US of
A!

Lump Sums

So I don't get it. Where was
all that griping about
tobacco companies and Ted
Turner and the IMF and big
business in general aimed?
There were various points you
were making but I didn't see
a central focus or whatever.
What I'm trying to say here
is what are we supposed to
think? OK, we can agree
with each of these little
ideas and agree overall that
having lots of money is bad,
but is this anything new?
I've felt that way for
a while. What can I learn from
this edition of Suck?

Kinda Embarrassed

You can learn that you never
get satisfactory answers
when you really need them.

OK, so what's your point?
People give too much money
away, and you're pissed
because they're not giving it
to you? Organizations are
asking for too much money,
and you're wishing you could
catch Ted Turner's contagious
over-cashed infection? You
want to give your share away
too, right?

I'm trying to see through
"Goddamn, those
money-grubbing Girl Scouts"
to an actual message, however
thin it may be. But really
all I'm seeing is a whiner
who wishes he could get the
"State Troopers are your
first line of defense"
sticker without paying off
the local lawman.

Ss
<scott@gist.ubalt.edu>

Look Ss, I'm sorry if you
never realized that a
tax-deductible donation is
still a donation. You give,
girl, but I recommend the
Jerry Lewis Telethon over
whatever booster club bilge
you've been blindly
supporting. I'll bet you have
a lot of cool stickers in the
back window of your truck -
trade me a Nature Conservancy
for the Spice Girls?

What I wish to suggest is
that people give too much
money away to other monied
people (and institutions),
while the Piggly Wiggly continues to
report stolen shopping carts
daily. Meanwhile,
donation-driven crisis
signals create a feeling of
hopelessness back on Main
Street, and simple social
problems start to seem
insurmountable. It's all
hype. You don't need a
nonprofit sector to help out
a fellow American who's down
on their luck, and there's no
reason a welfare big brother
deserves better treatment
than a welfare mother.

DJ ABE

P. S. New York City doesn't
have State Troopers, that's
why you're funny.

Good Lord! This article was
hands-down the most bitter
and negative Suck I've read
to date. Full marks.

Speaking of tax-funded
ballparks ... check out
Seattle for a measure of the
power of New Money®. Not
only did a certain
ex-Microsoft employee demand
that the city build his
football team a new stadium,
he managed to buy himself an
election in order to get the
tax hike approved! The free
market operating at it's
highest level of application,
I say. Meanwhile, the city of
Seattle has recently
implemented a generic
"homeless law," where
basically standing in a
public place without
appearing to have a purpose
is a crime if the Seattle
Police decide you're
"undesirable." But other than
that, things are great here
in the Northwest. We continue
to pursue our Master
Plan®: spreading the viruses
of Barnes & Noble,
Starbucks, and Microsoft. Up
with mediocrity!!

Jonathan Grant

Thanks, but it was intended
to be the most
well-intentioned and
kind-hearted Suck ever
written, wagging a finger at
institutions that feed
themselves instead of the
truly needy. The unstated
goal was to create in the
readership an imperative
generosity toward fish and
fowl, and people who stink
worse than both. If you found
it depressing, you must be
among the tiny minority of
Suck readers not working at
home, and therefore part of
the problem.

As far as the Pacific
Northwest goes, I'm not
surprised to hear that
Seattle is following every
trend on the books. But I
thought standing around
slack-jawed was considered a
civic duty.

DJ Abraham L.

Dear Abe:

Apropos of the beggars we
meet and greet, let me share
a great line from a Tom
Stoppard play, Indian Ink.
Set in the time of the Raj, a
young English person is
horrified by the beggars he
sees everywhere on the
streets and asks his Indian
friend how he bears it. His
friend is bemused: You pass,
he notes, many restaurants
and shoe repair shops on the
street as well and they don't
annoy you. When you see a
beggar, he suggests, think
"do I need a beggar today?"
If you do, give him money; if
not, don't worry about it.

Thus, when George
Steinbrenner begs New York
City for a billion dollars
for his new stadium, don't be
annoyed. Just ask - do I need
a beggar today?

"I used to be disgusted/Now I
try to be amused...."

Alan Kornheiser
<ASKORNHEISER@prodigy.net>

Alan,

Very amusing parable, except,
when applied to
Steinbrenner-sized
excavations, the question is
whether the beggar really
wants you or not.

DJ Abe Lincoln