A
B
Marlon Brando
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.
Al
Bore. He lost. Sort
of. Well, actually, not sort of, or he wouldn't be here, would he?
C
Jimmy Carter
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.
Bill Clinton
Bill Clitton. No one has ever fought
harder to keep from being consigned to this page. His bet was obviously
that if he engineered yet another big ugly scandal on his last day in office,
he could remain in the spotlight for many more months of futile investigations,
empty hearings, and impotent Republian wails of protest. Being the consummate
professional that he is, Clitton did as well as anyone could have done.
His pardon of Richard Rich, the
Darth Vater of international finance and treason, was brilliant, almost
a masterpiece in its smooth amalgamation of such Clitton trademarks as
sexual hijinks, semi-obvious but unprovable foreign bribes, and smiling
contempt for the dignity and integrity of the Presdency. The surrounding
ring of lesser pardon scandals approached perfection in its time-release
tawdriness, those expanding ripples that carried one after another of his
intimates into the scornful glare of the media--Huge
Roddem, Roger Clitton, and
even the great white whale of his Presdency, Hillery
herself. It was a grand show, and it bought Bill a little more time in
the sun... But let's face it, an ex-Presdent is automatically a Has-Been,
even if he has his office in Haarlem and his library in a setting that
rivals Dizzyland. It's over, Bill. Get used to it.
D
Michael Dukakis
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 Joel
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 Ford
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 Ginsberg
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.
Now that 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.
Rudy Giuliani
Rudy Giuliangri. The lame duck mayor
of Newyork, who was tough enough to put John Goddi behind bars and tough
enough to clean up the biggest, nastiest city in Ameria, but not tough
enough to run for office against Hillery.
She knocked him out in the first round without even working up a sweat.
In fact, she knocked him right into this ironic little niche--buried between
the wacked-out lawyer who couldn't prevent
the Clittons from destroying another of their innumerable victims and the
mafia chieftain who didn't know a tenth as much about organized crime as
the former First Family of Ameria. A
good place for Rudy to sit and think about things. Maybe he'll learn something.
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
Vanilla Ice
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
Rodney King
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 Manson
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
Q
R
Ronald Reagan
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 Schwartzkopf
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 Taylor
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
Lawrence Walsh
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
Beavis & Butthead
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.)
Go to What's New from Mother
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2001
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2000-2001
Go to Who's Who in History
Go to Shuteye Nation 2001.
Go to Shuteye Nation 2000
Go to Shuteye Nation Gazetteer.
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Go to the Y2001 Amerian Glossary
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