SMALL FAVORS
MILLER, ARTHUR S.
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Demise and Obsequies O.K., all you smartypants wiseacres who think the Harmonic Convergence was just a heavy load of codswallop, what about Ed Meese, huh? Is this man...
...You all know how at least 250,000 grieving, hysterical Elvis fans descended on Memphis that week and carried on like banshees...
...I met some folks at the American Civil Liberties Union convention in Philadelphia this summer who said they thought that with all the whoopdedo over the Bicentennial of the Constitution, General Meese might accidentally learn what's in it, that he might experience some education on the topic...
...They can't help it...
...I say educating the Attorney General is a bad ol' idea...
...The very man who conducted a nationwide search for the finest legal mind eligible to sit on the Supreme Court and came up with Robert Bork...
...Writing about Elvis's funeral for that pompous journal was ridiculous: The Times insisted that I refer to him as "Mr...
...I know all this because I stayed in a dorm at the cheerleading camp while writing about what The Times referred to as "Mr...
...The occasion was, in fact, Elvis's funeral, which I covered for The New York Times...
...The entire Shriners of the whole southeastern United States is who...
...If that's not Harmonic Convergence, John Connally ain't broke...
...I'm about to tell you all the stuff The Times did not see fit to print...
...Now, I want to make a further claim for Harmonic Convergence: The weekend of astrally ordained transcendent consciousness also happened to be the tenth anniversary of Elvis's death, and that put me in mind of the last time I witnessed such a happy confluence of the vagaries of popular culture...
...It's a wonderful thing...
...In East Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...Presley's demise and obsequies...
...If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect...
...I don't know whether you're familiar with the culture of cheerleading camps, but they exist in a frenzy of enthusiasm, lashed on by the hope each cheerleading team has of winning the Spirit Stick for the day...
...It was fairly surreal and reminded me, as I am reminded ten years later, that we do, indeed, live in a Great Nation...
...Now, you may say that in keeping with Ryan's Law—Ryan's Law holds that Murphy was an optimist—the authorities will not exercise their new power to put Meese in preventive detention even though they now have both right and reason...
...Is this man living proof of a New Age or what...
...If your team wins it three days in a row, you get to keep it, but that has never happened...
...Maybe it'll turn out that way with Meese, too...
...Also in Memphis at the same time was the World's Largest Cheerleading Camp, or so the Memphis Chamber of Commerce claimed...
...They were convening in Memphis that very week, and you know what Shriners in convention will do...
...But do you know who was already in town before Elvis ever croaked...
...How else you going to account for it...
...That's contradictory...
...I say the General already knows everything he's ever going to learn and anything more will just make him grumpy...
...Well, you just assumed that given a chance like that, of course the fools would use it, but no, Shamrock stayed right there, squatting all over South Main...
...First, pigs can't sing, and besides it annoys the pig...
...Of course his conduct is the product of the unusual surge of earth energy caused by astral alignment and predicted since the Golden Age of the Mayans...
...I remember when they first built the Astrodome in Houston, it was advertised as being so big that you could put the Shamrock Hotel inside it...
...Texas we say, "Never try to teach a pig to sing...
...If this isn't the indivisible oneness at work, Michael Dukakis has a sense of humor...
...So all week long, all over Memphis, Elvis fans sobbed and fainted and attacked you like furies if you happened to observe that the poor man had died a fat drug addict, and the Shriners weaved through the crowds of mourners on their trikes wearing fezzes and tooting their New Year's Eve horns, and stray bands of cheerleaders were always around chanting, "Pizza man, pizza man, rah, rah, RAH...
...And the fellow is just as happy as if he had good sense...
...They wear their red fezzes with the gold tassels everywhere, and when they have imbibed too much of the juice of the grape, which is often, they like to ride little tricycles around their convention hotels and the downtown area while tooting on New Year's Eve horns...
...Edwin Meese explained why he opposes the Miranda warning by saying, "You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime...
...Observe: Just as citizens of even the meanest intelligence are reluctantly forced to conclude that our only Attorney General is a menace to the safety and freedom of the people, the Supreme Court, at this very moment in time, approves preventive detention for those who endanger the public safety...
...Presley...
...I've been disappointed this way before...
...The way you win the Spirit Stick is by showing spirit, and the way you show spirit is to bound out of bed in the morning, do handsprings end over end down the hall to the bathroom, cheer while brushing your teeth, cheer while washing your face, cheer for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, cheer when the pizza man brings the pizza, and so forth...
...The Spirit Stick looks, to the uninitiated eye, a whole lot like a broomhandle painted red, white, and blue, but it's the Spirit Stick...
...Now don't that make your liver quiver...
Vol. 51 • October 1987 • No. 10
