Laughing my ass off

Anyway, the shouting. In the first place, shouting is Wolf Blitzer's only mode of address. I fear that crouching on the hotel floor while bombs went off overhead during the first Gulf War permanently damaged his inner ears. My grandmother is quite hard of hearing these days. Every room in her home contains a TV, every one of them is always on, and all of them are turned up so high that Helen Keller could understand every word by feeling the vibrations in the floorboards. I walked in just the other day and Blitzer's Phillip K. Dick scream-a-thon, the "Situation Room" was playing in the living room. There he was standing in front of 4,000 moniters each subdivided into 97 tiny image insets all talking simultaneously. And there he stood, bellowing.

Now if that were not bad enough, Blitzer speaks English as if it were his eighth language, and he has never mastered its interrogative form. I am somewhat sympathetic. Having never quite achieved native fluency in French, I often find myself constructing elaborate statements followed by a wilting n'est-ce pas when I'm trying to ask something in that language. Blitzer questions like an autistic Latvian on a three-day cocaine bender, shouting subjects and misconjugated predicates in rapid series until a whole edifice of somehow-related anecdotes and propositions sits teetering in the empire of the airwaves, then shuffles his ever-gaping yawn-hole into a preposterous frown and asks everyone to raise their hand if they agree. The reason that they shout back at him is the same reason I shout at my grandmother: I figure she won't hear me if I don't, and besides, I have no fucking idea what she's talking about in the first place. Names and events from decades before I was born in neighborhoods I have never entered elide themselves into a miasma of sensecent nostalgia. Do I remember Johnny Kanootz who used to come into the bar, who they called Johnny Go-Go because of his girlfriend, or maybe because of his car, back in '64, when the Pirates still played at Forbes Field? Good god, no. This, friends, is what it's like to be poor John Edwards confronted by that bearded madman. You are half-afraid that in the middle of a sentence he's going to forget your name, start screaming, "Why are you in my house?!" and try to stab you with a butter knife. It is, in other words, at once deeply sad and thoroughly terrifying.

-- IOZ