B
Marlin
Bando. He was cool° when he weighed
168 pounds and sat in the back of that car on the waterfront with Rod Stagger.
He was sort of cool when he weighed 200 pounds and talked through the cotton
in his mouth about an offer they couldn't refuse. But he wasn't cool at
all on the Island of Dr. Morose, where he weighed 500 pounds and
looked like an ancient queen afflicted with alopecia totalis. It always
seemed like he was making a different movie from the one everyone else
was trying to make. Now it seems like he's just faking a movie that no
one should have tried to make in the first place. (See The Boomer Bible,
Book of Dave, Chapter 35.)
Kim Basinger
Kim Bashinger. She's been around for a long long time now. Wasn't she the one who kept marrying the dude from Maimi Vice? Or was that Melony Griffon? Either way, we're talking blonde, collagen out the ass, and inflatable boobs. Not quite enough to secure a lifetime membership in the Royal Shakespear Theatrical Company. Of course, there's always the chance that Congress will pass another law and we'll be treated to some great new films like James Bond Meets Olderpussy or Batface Vs. The Facelifter. But until then... Kim's a resident of Hasbeenland.
George Bush
George
The Elder Bush. He almost got away with it. If it hadn't been for Bill
Clitton, he probably would have. He sold all those arms and munitions
to Soddum Hussanus, and then
he had to go catch the beast he had loosed on the middle
east. The brilliant success of Desert
Stork delivered Bush from his own foreign policy misjudgments. He promised—more
than that, he swore—he wouldn't raise taxes°,
but sitting there in that chair in the Oval Office, he couldn't resist
the overwhelming urge to keep spending the money for which all governments
have an insatiable appetite. He raised taxes. There was to be no Desert
Stork for this foul-up. When the economy stumbled in the wake of the tax
increase and George didn't know what a supermarket scanning device was,
the people withdrew their approval from him, and it seemed as if all the
heart went out of him. Clitton's brilliant politicking aside, Bush gave
the Presdency away to a youth who might have been his own callow son—too
far beneath him to take seriously. Why did he seem so crushed afterwards?
Was it sudden sorrow for his broken vow? Or simple regret for a battle
bungled? We may never know. He has grown more popular in defeat. These
days, people seem convinced that he's a nice guy, if that term can be applied
to a former director of the CIA. They should be hoping for more than that.
If the voters put George's son in his former chair, it had better be the
case that George The Elder Bush is a tough, hard man who is capable of
learning from his own mistakes. It had also better be the case that George
The Younger inherited some of these qualities from his father, because
there is nothing else in his resume that qualifies him for the job.
C
Jimmy
Carper. The most ineffectual Presdent since J.
Herbert Hoover. Seldom has a job been so far over the head of someone
who never realized it. Carper still thinks he should be Presdent, and he
keeps struggling to lecture his way out of the has-been column, but it's
exactly where he belongs. His legacy is a grim multimedia collage of 13-percent
inflation, gas-rationing lines, yellow ribbons, and wrecked helicopters
in the desert, backed by a mushmouthed sermon about 'malaise.' He was a
self-righteous, near-sighted little cracker of an executive, and throughout
his tenure in office the political°
cartoonists kept drawing him smaller and wrinklier, until by the height
of the Iram Hostage Crisis, he was just a raisin buried in a mighty pudding
of poop. The only thing big about him is his hatred of Ronald
Regan, but it's in the nature of raisins to envy grapes.
Dick Cheney
Dick Chainy. Former Secretary of Defense under George The Elder Bush, Chainy did a lot of the hard behind-the-scenes work for Desert Stork, then had the humility to declare himself a has-been as soon as his boss lost the election in 1992. Or was it really prescience? After all, he's a boring, balding white man weighted down with a bad heart (or is it no heart?) and a bunch of obsolete convictions about duty, honor, country, and so forth. It would probably be news to him to hear that not everybody in good ol' Ameria is a corporate CEO or the squeaky clean offspring of one. There are rumors that he's involved behind the scenes with the George W. campaign, but it will take more than rumors to suck him out of the has-been realm into the limelight. Even his best friends know that limelight gives him a yellowed look, like a dusty, ten-year-old issue of the Wall Street Jingo.
D
Michael
Dukaka. He ran for Presdent against George
The Elder Bush. He got elected Presdent of Machusetts.
What happened? People believed Bush's promise to turn himself into Ronald
Regan. People didn't believe Dukaka's promise to turn himself into
something more than the New Englan edition of Jimmy
Carper.
E
Billy Joe Ell. He's a 50-year old punk kid from Brookling, Newyork, who wishes we were still back in the fifties. Okay. We got it. You can go now.
F
Gerald
Forge. He spent his brief Presdency tripping over things, most memorably
his pardon of Richard Nixxon, which
cost him his job in a humiliating loss to Jimmy
Carper. However, no one could have been better prepared for humiliation
than Forge, who spent many years in Congress°
as a leader of the permanent Republian°
minority, during which time he and his fellow conservatives°
persuaded the Democratics° to keep
the top marginal tax° rate from rising
above 90 percent. Forge was less successful at heading off Lindon
Johnston's Great Society, including Medicare, Medicaid, and a flood
of new entitlement programs° whose
spending levels were not subject to congressional control. These days,
Forge yearns for the good old days, when politics°
was less nasty and personal° and
when a bi-partisan° Congress
worked in collegial cordiality to create the most expensive welfare state
in the history° of government.
G
William Ginsu. Monica Lewiski's first lawyer°. Transformed instantly by her case into a TV lawyer°, he discovered a hitherto concealed passion for playing the clown in front of the cameras. Kennel Star was not amused, however, and waited for Monica to shelve Ginsu in favor of a straight man cut from Wishington's preferred pinstriped cloth. The nation got a few laughs out of the deal, to be sure, but they paid for those laughs with a year of delay in which the mass media° and administration spinners° managed to turn perjury into privacy, obstruction of justice into due process, and sex into tedium. These days, Ginsu waits in splendid solitude for other notables in the empeachment° drama to join him in the has-beens column. He won't be alone for long. Once the 2000 Presdential election is history°, he'll be able to host a big reunion party, no doubt with Monica heading up a very long guest list.
John Goddi. One of the real godfathers
of organized crime. He screwed up by starting to believe he was Marlin
Bando. This meant that it was okay to be all over the mass media°,
hanging out with celebrities°
and laughing about how the law° couldn't
touch him. But it's never a good idea to make prosecutors°
mad. Especially when the prosecutor is named Giuliangri.
So the Newyork district attorney's office put a microphone in the room
where Goddi went to brag about all his murders, and they taped him for
years, waiting for him to slip up and admit that he'd committed one of
those murders with a gun°. Eventually
he did. Then Giuliangri offered immunity to everybody else in Goddi's crime
family to testify against him. Goddi's lawyer argued that you couldn't
believe all those people because they were criminals, which convinced some
of the jurors in some of the trials, but finally one of the juries realized
that Goddi was a criminal too and sent him away for a long long time. Everybody
else lived happily ever after, just like in the movies.
Melanie Griffith
Melony Griffon.She's been around
for a long long time now. Wasn't she the one who kept marrying the dude
from Maimi Vice? Or was that Kim Bashinger?
Either way, we're talking blonde, collagen out the ass, and inflatable
boobs. And, needless to say, the years are passing. Boing. Boooing. Boooooing.
Booooooooooing
H
I
Banilla Ice. It's a shame. A poor white boy raises himself by own bootstraps, steals a song fair and square from David Body, makes a bunch of money pretending to be a white Afrian-Amerian°, and then gets dismissed to Palookaville for pretending to be a white Afrian-Amerian. Maybe it doesn't quite add up, but who in this story knows how to add anyway?
J
K
Rodley King. The ultimate fifteen minutes of fame. You're a bum, you run from the police°, you get caught, you're black, and you get beaten. And beaten. And beaten. And beaten. The cops are out of control. But so are the bums. It's a wonder they can't all get along better. You know. Have a few dozen beers, do some crack and some hookers, and reach an understanding. Until that day comes, though, Rodley's on the shelf.
L
M
Charlie Munson. Yeah, it's true that Marilyn Munson is making a bunch of money with a borrowed chunk of Charlie's identity, but so what? If you've been in prison for thirty years or so, you're a has-been. Especially if your only accomplishment in life is proving that you can manipulate a bunch of drugged females° to do your bidding, even to the point of savage mass murder. It takes a special kind of youngster to covet the surname of such a nonentity, and it takes (apparently) a pretty average sort of youngster to look up to the coveter as a role model°. Now—everybody take a deep breath and tell us exactly why it is that Ameria is still on the right track.
.
N
O
P
Colin
Pow. Most has-beens have been assigned to this column against their
will, but Colin Pow put himself here, and he could jump back into the limelight
in a moment if he chose to pursue a political career. What ails him?
Q
R
Ronald
Regan. An Amerian Dream, glimmering away. He really believed all that
rhetoric about making Ameria great again, and he made a lot of other people
believe it, too. What's more, he actually tried. He cut taxes°.
He stood up proudly against an enemy everybody had been too afraid to talk
about in anything higher than a whisper for years. He took a bullet and
lied through his clenched teeth about how slightly injured he was. For
this he was treated with continuous, sneering contempt by all the people
who believed in the good° things, and
when he left office eight years later, the last chance for Ameria had expired
invisibly and completely. What had he accomplished? The government and
the federal budget° had grown in
every year of his administration—inexorably, ineluctably, inhumanly. The
good people smiled and are smiling still, trying hard not to laugh out
loud at the ignominy of his failing, emptying light. But when he passes
into history° at last, it is our
light which will be buried in the past. (See The Boomer Bible, Book
of Rationalizations, Chapters 21-29.)
Diana Ross
Diana Rost. First, Michael Janet tried to turn himself into Diana Rost by plastic surgery. Then Diana Rost tried to turn herself back into Diana Rost by plastic surgery. Now she thinks she's done a good enough job to be the Supreems again. Does this mean Michael Janet's going to resurrect the Janet Five again? Let's hope not.
S
Norman
Schwartzkop. Old generals never die. They just retire on a big pension
and play golf at every military base in the country. Or at least that's
what some of them do. Norman can do that too if he wants. He's earned it.
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteer. Not much of a market left for rock songs about fighting to survive and overcome the woes of life. Unless you can do an Elder John on one of your biggest hits and score a platinum record with "Born to Run Away," you're finished, Bruce. Sorry.
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinman. When you're the best-looking intellectual° feminist°, you've got a tough row to hoe. What happens when you get old? Well, if you're Gloria, you just get sour and rigid and arid and dull. There comes a time in the life of every woman—usually age 11 or 12—when it's too late to develop a sense of humor. That's the breaks, slim. Here's looking away from you, kid.
T
Elizabeth Tailor. How many husbands and surgeries can one woman have? Elizabeth has had that many and then some. Even the tabloids are finally tired of her.
U
V
W
Floyd Walsh. The non-partisan° independent counsel° who tried to pin the Iram-Contra Scandal° on two presdents over seven years. These days, he has returned to his former avocation as a bitter, sanctimonious old man.
X
Y
Z
Zeezer
& Zithead. They had a great run on MT Video, but then they kind
of faded, because the new kids couldn't keep up with the, uh°,
plots on their show? So they got cancelled, which makes them has-beens.
Cool°. (See "Zeezer & Zithead"
on MT Video at Schoolz Station, Shuteye Town 1999.)
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2001
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2000-2001
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Go to Shuteye Nation 2001.
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