by Lonnie Carter
The playwright William Saroyan is best known for his story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” and his play “The Time of Your Life”. Less known is his short wistful play “Hello Out There” in which a young man is behind bars. There’s a love interest, the daughter of the jailer as I recall, but all you really need to know is that he spends much of his time crying out, “Hello, out there!”, and not really getting an answer.
Newspaper junkies in recent days would have noticed the following items -
No Handouts
Beggars in the United Arab Emirates. It is illegal to shake a cup in the UAE’s capital, Dubai, yet recently foreigners travelling on business visas have been doing just that. It seems that there is no poverty in the land of the emirs, at least since the early days of the internal combustion engine, and that so much money freely flows that the citizens are embarrassed to be in the presence of beggars, foreign though they be, and, unlike in our own fine cities where some of our most outstanding citizens veritably hop right over comatose and bloodied wretches, freely hand over their moola. Indeed, the record haul of one of these mendicants is said to be $21,800 in fourteen days. Whether this is a case of the already well-to-do begging for a handout I don’t know, although the precedent from Chrysler on up is pretty clear. One can only imagine that Lee Iacocca ( a name from pre-history) would write a book called “Panhandling in the Emirates, the Corporate Climbers Guide to Highway Robbery”. The central government has decreed that from now on the embassies will handle all visa requests and not have them processed through foreign business corporations. (I don’t get that last part. I would have said that embassies of course already handled all visa requests. Shows to go ya.)
The prison population of the Good Ole We and Us-A just accepted its two millionth paying guest giving it the highest percentage of incarcerated citizens in the world. Numerous large investment banks cherishing each investor one at a time in the marvelous old fashioned way each write prison construction bonds to the loony tune of $2 to 3 billion per year.
Double-You Smoosh, the present and , one would hope, continuing governor of the Yellow Rose State, has seen the prison population rise nearly four-fold to 150,000 during his conservatively compassionate reign. (What to expect from a candidate whose campaign adverted that McCane – McConfectionered, finally – was soft on breast cancer.)
John McCain, also finally neither McAbel nor McAble, called Pat Smarmertson and Jerry Teletubby evil muthatruckas, which of course anyone with half a hippocampus knew before the beginning of the teaching of creationism at Bob Jones (is that his real name?) Uniblustery. (It remains to be seen if Smoosh’s appearance at that august South Carolina Institution of Higher Lynching will rank with Dukakis’ photo-op in the tank, Smoosh Sr.’s nervously glancing at his watch during his “debate” with Cockalinton, Muskie’s crying through the snowflakes of New Hampshire, Nixon’s glistening five o’clock shadow as he sweated through the Sino-hotbeds of Quemoy and Matsu, etjetsetera..)
The McCain Myth
But, mirabile dictu, then the AriZona senator, getting high marks from the bottled ice tea-sucking generation who had been quite proud of saying that they would vote for only the most flaccid of slackers but now were tearing each other’s lungs out to be McCainiacs, said he was only kidding. Are you kidding? The truth, the Straight Talk Express finally nails, as no other Repub has had the guts to, these ninety-five speciousnesses to the church door of the Moral Majority (as the bumper sticker had it, they are neither) , at last a saltine is called a saltine, and the Hero of the Hanoi Hilton says it was all in good clean fun! He jokes like that all the time. Just when even yrs untruly was fantasizing that Cindy would be in the White House, McCombover says it was all joshing or Jebbing or, worst, Double-You’ing.
And just when – I think that’s the name of this column – I was sinking with the thought of Pataki as Veep giving us two Yalie dullards named George to boot around, Albany’s Tall Guy comes out with his guns smoking right at the NRA and defending the damsel of derringer control.
Just what IS going on?
And the conservative governor of Illinois suspends all executions because judicial review shows that some forty per cent of the folks on Death Row are found to be unjustly imprisoned!
The accepted wisdom is that it took Nixon to go to China. I guess we libs can lie back and do what we do best, which is to snore contentedly.
Compensation Contemplation
Here’s the penultimate – the prison system is the nation’s second largest employer. After the Catholic Church. I’m kidding, Karol Woy (as in Oy Woy, at the Wailing Wall, how many times do you think you need to apologize on your ‘histeric’ visit to Israel, who do you think you are, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Jr. for your Stymietown remarks?). Not ther RCC, the Church of GM. And I don’t mean Genetically Modified, although we see reference to that more than we do to the MoTown automaker. More Town is Less Town these days and Gen Mots, not bon mots ’cause there ain’t no good words to say about ‘Like a Rock’, will have to knock the CEO’s pay packet down a nickel. ‘Course they could fire thousands of workers which would be deemed as more cost effective, what with the Chief receiving compensation 400 times, I kid you not, as Jack Paar had it, the average assembly- liner.
And the ultimate – you really had to hunt, scouring the alternative press wouldn’t even have come up with this one – the Chief Financial Officer of Mantan Moreland Provost Weimeraner is about to be indicted for crimes against the internet. Seems he byte off more than he can Chewish when he made an IPO of Austrian Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party hoping to hide the identity of his shadow cabinet – Idi Amin, Augusto Pinochet, Maragret Thatcher – all of whom were denied business visas by the UAE’s Secretary of Despots. You think a watched despot never boils? If you ain’t seen the Iron Maiden percolate, back away from your televisionary sets, boychicks and girls, it’s going to be whose Gore is oxed and Double-You Smoosh ’til the cows come back from the last pastures and the last acre of farmland is genetically handcuffed to make room for one more state-of-the-art hoosegow.
Conclusion
Saroyan won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for “The Time of your Life” He turned down the award. The New York Public Library Desk Reference says that “his essential theme is the triumph of childlike goodness over the corruption of a materialistic society.” His other famous play is “The Human Comedy.”
