SMALL FAVORS:Happy Developments
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Happy Developments Ithink it proves there is a God," said one Texas liberal about the Presidential campaign of Phil Gramm. Clearly, a kind and beneficent Deity has...
...The Liars' Club, A Memoir, by Mary Karr, is such an original jewel of a book...
...One flak bragged that messages from old ladies were sent on "little kitty stationery...
...But now callers to an 800 number—advertised, say, on the Rush Limbaugh program—can reach a professional letter-writer who will "individualize" their corporately funded responses...
...Astroturf is political-speak for phony grassroots campaigns tricked up to look like genuine citizen concern...
...This taught Mary Karr one of life's greatest lessons—if you can survive something, no matter how awful, it will make a great story...
...Even the S&L debacle couldn't give deregulation a bad name with Republicans, but sick seafood may do the trick...
...But it was the thought of tainted meat that turned the public's stomach and left Dole sputtering about "scare tactics...
...Five million Americans a year get food poisoning and 4,000 of us die of it every year, in large part because of a meat-inspection program that is undermanned, underfunded, and hasn't changed a lick since Upton Sinclair's day...
...Karr's momma was an artist who had lived in New York City, listened to opera, and read Camus in a town that stinks with petrochemical refineries and considers Roy Orbison a great artist...
...And now, here's some recommended reading for the dog days of summer: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, by John Allen Paulos, will help rescue the concerned citizen drowning in the surf of competing numbers produced by special-interest disinformation campaigns...
...Sinclair observed of his novel The Jungle, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach...
...Clearly, a kind and beneficent Deity has arranged to keep Gramm at 9 percent despite his megabucks...
...There are so many touching moments in this book, it's hard to pick one, but I was struck by one detail...
...Senator Bob Dole has just hit the Upton Sinclair jackpot...
...The Department of Agriculture was fixing to replace this horse-and-buggy system with microbial testing until the Dole-Johnson "Comprehensive Regulatory Reform Act" came along...
...Karr, who is a poet by trade, and her sister Lecia, who was tougher than a fifty-cent steak by the age of ten, both bobbed up out of this childhood with their sanity and their love for their parents still intact...
...Her column appears in this space every month...
...But anyone who has ever smelled the Golden Triangle (Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange) will be moved by the fact that momma wore Shalimar perfume.* Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram...
...What the P.R...
...Carcinogens and pesticides would also come under more benign regard from the FDA, and the "reform" bill is riddled with loopholes written by lobbyists for utility companies, Georgia-Pacific, and the cement-kiln industry, among others...
...Her daddy used to take her along to the Legion Hall and the bait shop, where he and his friends swapped stories about dogs, snakes, hoboes, the Depression, and all that good stuff...
...Meanwhile, there's a happy development on the political public-relations front...
...Paulos, the perfect writer for the mathematically impaired, is always refreshing, reassuring, and friendly...
...If ignorance is bliss, that man must be ecstatic...
...In other happy developments, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jesse Helms (which is funny all by itself) observed of the African holocaust, "Rwanda signed that treaty, and now we're supporting all the people that did all those horrible things, the Tutus versus the Hoodoos...
...How delightful...
...According to the commendable publication, PR Watch, firms are now having advertising wars over who provides "real" astroturf and who provides the phony...
...No wonder she had a breakdown...
...firms mean by "real" astroturf is a better grade of phony...
...He breaks down complex mathematical theories into everyday examples that will help us all cut through the flimflam...
...Meat inspectors still use the poke-and-smell system...
...Dole's effort to deregulate everything ran afoul of foul food...
...Dudn't that make you proud to be an American...
...Karr grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, one of the homeliest places on the planet, with a working-class daddy and a momma who was "nervous," which is East Texas for everything from nail-biting to full-blown psychosis...
...For example, "old" astroturf would have asked citizens only to sign prewritten postcards with identical messages, easily spotted as a special-interest ploy...
Vol. 59 • September 1995 • No. 9
