Purple Prose
When I was a Little Kid, growing up in West Chester, Pa., in the late 1960s, my parents used to get two daily newspapers. That's a story in itself (nobody does that nowadays). They got the big city Philadelphia Inquirer in the morning and the hometown Daily Local News (affectionately known as "Daily Lacka News") in the afternoon.
One day, I picked up the "Local" from their coffee table and saw a sight that made my 10-year-old eyes get big. Contractors had been tearing down the old landmark Mansion House hotel in town to make way for a bank and a parking garage. The job was about half finished, and the picture in the paper showed the jagged profile of the half-demolished building. And someone at the newspaper had pasted into the background of the picture Godzilla and King Kong, duking it out.
I've never written to him to confirm this, but I'm convinced this was the work of a young assistant city editor at the paper named Dave Barry.
He later moved on to more prominent, though no less sophomoric, occupations. And at one point in my journalism career I, too, was assistant city editor at the Daily Local News. I heard my share of Dave Barry stories from older co-workers who remembered him. He once irritated a very irritable reporter to the point that the reporter threw a typewriter at Dave's head, and was fired -- for damaging company property.
Did Dave Barry survive the '80s? I'm still not sure. He was a riot back then, and his column was a must-read. But then you caught on to his bag of tricks, which leaned heavily on the "misdirection play" sentence. You know, give all the cliche clues of being about to say one thing and then say something perverse. "I would never say anything critical about so august an institution as the New York Times until I was sure I'd never get a job there." That sort of thing.
But he got some laughs out of me again today with this piece, his formula for national reconciliation in the wake of the ugly election:
His conculsion (and the Samoa reference derives from what comes above): "Remember that no matter where we live - be it in a red state, or a blue state, or a Samoan state - we are all Americans inside. If we cut ourselves, we will all bleed the same color; and then, as Americans, we will sue somebody."
Can we at least agree that we all need a laugh at ourselves collectively, and this is pretty funny?
One day, I picked up the "Local" from their coffee table and saw a sight that made my 10-year-old eyes get big. Contractors had been tearing down the old landmark Mansion House hotel in town to make way for a bank and a parking garage. The job was about half finished, and the picture in the paper showed the jagged profile of the half-demolished building. And someone at the newspaper had pasted into the background of the picture Godzilla and King Kong, duking it out.
I've never written to him to confirm this, but I'm convinced this was the work of a young assistant city editor at the paper named Dave Barry.
He later moved on to more prominent, though no less sophomoric, occupations. And at one point in my journalism career I, too, was assistant city editor at the Daily Local News. I heard my share of Dave Barry stories from older co-workers who remembered him. He once irritated a very irritable reporter to the point that the reporter threw a typewriter at Dave's head, and was fired -- for damaging company property.
Did Dave Barry survive the '80s? I'm still not sure. He was a riot back then, and his column was a must-read. But then you caught on to his bag of tricks, which leaned heavily on the "misdirection play" sentence. You know, give all the cliche clues of being about to say one thing and then say something perverse. "I would never say anything critical about so august an institution as the New York Times until I was sure I'd never get a job there." That sort of thing.
But he got some laughs out of me again today with this piece, his formula for national reconciliation in the wake of the ugly election:
For example, a delegation from Texas could go to California and show the Californians how to do some traditional Texas thing such as castrate a bull using only your teeth, and then the Californians could show the Texans how to rearrange their football stadiums in accordance with the principles of "feng shui" (for openers, both goalposts should be at the west end of the field).
Or maybe New York and Kentucky could have a college-style "mixer," featuring special "crossover" hors d'oeuvres such as bagels topped with squirrel parts.
His conculsion (and the Samoa reference derives from what comes above): "Remember that no matter where we live - be it in a red state, or a blue state, or a Samoan state - we are all Americans inside. If we cut ourselves, we will all bleed the same color; and then, as Americans, we will sue somebody."
Can we at least agree that we all need a laugh at ourselves collectively, and this is pretty funny?
