Just last week as I was watching the latest episode of corporate malfeasance I wondered, “Whatever happened to Lee Iacocca?” (Or, by extension, people like him.) Then yesterday, Kim Glann sent me this, from Mr. Iacocca’s introduction to his new book:

Had Enough?

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies.

Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

You can read the rest by clicking here. Happily, the link is to Snopes.com, who have pre-debunked the piece (yes, it is indeed by Mr. Iacocca).

I wonder if this was written before the November 2006 elections. Probably. Because the only way left to throw these particular bums out is through impeachment and removal — and that’s a crusade I would gladly join.

While I’m on about this:

In the comics, he can beat The Sinister Six (which, you’ll note, includes The Sandman). He’s done it over and over.

In the movie, there are only two villains and still he has to go begging to a former foe for help. Said assistance arrives about one nanosecond before all hopes for a Spider-Man 4 are squashed.

What gives?

On your left is former Senator Mike Gravel, who recently announced for president. How former? A Democrat, he represented Alaska from 1969 until 1981. That means his last real relationship in the White House was with Jimmy Carter.

I don’t think we’re going to need to say much more about Mr. Gravel, no matter how much fans of Charles Dickens might appreciate names like Mr. Gravel.

I’m posting his photo so you can get a little look at him. This is more of a look than I got at the convention, because Mr. Gravel was not afforded a true speaking opportunity at the convention — a decision I support. You open that door for Mr. Gravel and Lyndon LaRouche might think he’s entitled to step through it as well. Rather than a speaking opportunity in the main hall, Senator Gravel was offered “comments” during the party chair’s welcoming reception Friday night. By the time I got there, both all the food and every bit of Senator Gravel were gone. No one I spoke with seems to have caught Senator Gravel’s comments, or to be able to relate them to me. I don’t even think I was very late for this function, so he may have spoken while I was there and I missed it too. Although I was able to get a half cup of Coke for $2.75. With ice. Luckily I had cash on me.

I say luckily because I pulled into the convention center at the precise time my orientation was supposed to begin and didn’t have time to stop at an ATM. Parking at the convention center is eight bucks, they want payment upon entry, and no, they won’t take a credit card. They will take a check, though (?) and, of course, cash. I fished in my wallet and found five singles. And then spent what felt like nine hours digging through the jumbled coins-and-CD-storage area of my car trolling for stray quarters and such until finally exhuming three bucks in change including, yes, pennies. The attendant wasn’t thrilled and the 87 drivers behind me were decidedly unhappy. Once inside the convention center I immediately hit the ATM and took out $200 — and was dispensed four $50 bills. Want to know how many places won’t take a $50 bill? One way to find out is to do what I did — make sure it’s the only cash on you.

After orientation and receiving the schedule, I got back in the car and drove to find my hotel. It was somewhere near the end of the known universe. Remember the famous New Yorker cover that shows everything past the Hudson River in the far distance, hovering near the vanishing point? My hotel, one of the convention headquarter hotels, was similarly located. From the convention center, my hotel was somewhere past the point where Medieval mapmakers showed ships passing sea monsters and falling off the map. After 20 years of regular visits to San Diego, I had naively asserted that I had stayed in every hotel in San Diego. Not so. This hotel, and I use the term loosely, was something called “The Handlery.” No, I don’t know what that means either. I can say that it is a hotel in the way that Ticketmaster service charges are “convenience fees.” Rather than a hotel, it more closely approximated a Howard Johnson’s from Pennsylvania cow country. From the luxury of my ground-level room, conveniently adjacent to the parking lot where someone was having a tailgate party while I checked in, I could listen in to my neighbor’s television through the wall. Not because the television was too loud, but because the walls were too thin, a determination proved by the fact that I could also hear him use the bathroom. You may use your imagination about that; I didn’t need to.

Once I had checked in and absorbed all the glamor afforded by these surroundings, I went back to the convention, missed Senator Gravel as detailed above, and then went to my first caucus meeting and did the tour of hospitality suites. A lot of this was inspiring, some discouraging, and some downright wacky, as I’ll recount next time.

As I recounted here, in January I was elected as member of the California State Democratic Central Committee. Specifically, I’m a member of the Assembly District 43 delegation. This two-year position makes me a delegate to the state convention this and next year. And that’s where I was just over a week ago: at the convention in San Diego.

While there, I got a close look at all the major Democratic presidential candidates except one, Joe Biden, who didn’t come — although he did have people working a table in the exhibit area. These people seemed abashed that he wasn’t there and gave queasy explanations having to do with the sudden change of the California primary (it’s now much, much earlier), making this convention more important but only after Biden had already planned to stay in South Carolina. (Also the site of a convention in the same timeframe, and also a state with an early primary.) We already have a “president” (please note the quote marks) who doesn’t adapt quickly to change and we don’t need another, so I won’t be supporting Biden.

Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson all made it. In fact, even former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel made it — and his last campaign statement showed net assets of only $458, so I’m not  even sure how he swung airfare. So again, why not Biden?

Over the next few days I’m going to upload some photos and share some thoughts about these candidates, as well as overall impressions of the convention. In fact, I’m going to start with the very next post.

As I watched “Spider-Man 3” yesterday morning patently bored by endless scenes concerning Mary Jane’s acting-career frustrations or Aunt May’s rheumatic recountings of her idyllic past with dead Uncle Ben, I began to recall that as a boy I was not a regular reader of Spider-Man comics. In fifth grade I did do a trade with a boy named Chris and got a slew of Spider-Man comics from issue 70-something to issue 90-something, but I never spent my own money to buy one even as I paid for dozens of other titles. This web of memory spun on as, on the big screen, Harry Osborn lost his memory again and then regained it again, and an action scene was interupted for a too-long and unclever pas de deux between J. Jonah Jameson and a little girl in a crowd — and then I hit on it.

Spider-Man is a neurotic loser whose gift of incredible power never eclipses his character flaws. And on many levels, those character flaws are ones we mostly associate with gawky high-schoolers. He is somehow trapped in a failed adolescence.

The Fantastic Four are science adventurers, amalgamatic representations of Shackleton and Einstein. They explore the limits of space and time to broaden our understanding and enrich the human race.

Somehow at age eight I must have realized this:

Spider-Man comics were for boys who wanted to be someone else. Fantastic Four comics were for boys who wanted to be somewhere else.

Okay, in the past week, I’ve:

• Attended the California Democratic Convention as a delegate
• Mounted a one-act festival on a professional level at a mid-size house
• Read something like 1900 pages of student plays and turned in grades
• Had meetings and communications about next semester
• Started reading samples from playwrights interested in joining my workshop
• Worked on a merger with my company
• Did some transition work for my theatre company
• And just cleared 616 spam emails (!) from this blog

That’s why the blog hasn’t been updated in a week.

Tomorrow I’m going to start posting my thoughts on the convention and all the presidential candidates who showed up, including naming the one I signed up to volunteer for, and the one who scared the pants off me.  And I’ll be putting up at least one unflattering photo of Hillary Clinton, who just doesn’t photograph well and who unfortunately faces a different level of photography judgment because she’s a woman.

Stay tuned.

That’s what Bokonon calls most people’s busy-work plans (according to Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” which I reread this weekend). Except I really have been busy:

• I attended the state Democratic convention this past weekend as a delegate. (More on that soon.)
• It’s the end of the semester, so I have eleventy billion pages of script to read.
• I’m producing this little one-act festival for USC.

Just as soon as the smoke starts to clear I’ll be back with insights into Obama and Hillary, thoughts about playwriting, and fantasies about the vacation I won’t be taking.

I haven’t been a fan of Roger Ebert. Until now. He’s been sick with cancer — and hopes he’s getting better — and has had ugly, deforming surgery. But nothing is going to keep him from his film festival.

I like to think that if something like this happened to me, I’d still go to the San Diego Comic Con. Unlike Ebert, all the media wouldn’t turn out to photograph me in my post-surgical state.

Good for him. Character before beauty.

I’m of two minds about critic Charles McNulty’s piece in today’s LA Times in which he bemoans — but not quite — David Lindsay-Abaire’s upset win of a Pulitzer for “Rabbit Hole.”

McNulty wishes there were more support for cutting-edge theatre. Me, I wish there were more support for good plays, whether they’re cutting edge or not. I also think that Mr. Lindsay-Abaire was, until recently and with this play, somewhat edgy, at least in the eyes of most. Here’s how Wikipedia valiantly summarizes “Fuddy Meers,” a play I greatly enjoyed in a terrific production at the Colony Theatre a couple of years ago:

Fuddy Meers is an American play by David Lindsay-Abaire. It tells the story of an amnesiac, Claire, who awakens each morning as a blank slate on which her husband and teenage son must imprint the facts of her life. One morning Claire is abducted by a limping, lisping man who claims her husband wants to kill her. The audience views the ensuing mayhem through the kaleidoscope of Claire’s world. The play culminates in a cacophony of revelations, proving that everything is not what it appears to be.

Among his influences, Lindsay-Abaire lists playwrights John Guare, Edward Albee, Georges Feydeau, Eugène Ionesco, and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, 1930s screwball comedy films My Man Godfrey, Twentieth Century, and “anything by Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello.” Walking a fine line between grave reality and joyous lunacy, the world of his plays is often dark, funny, blithe, enigmatic, hopeful, ironic, and somewhat cockeyed. “My plays tend to be peopled with outsiders in search of clarity.”

I’m willing to bet that that list of influences would lure most of us into the theatre. It just sounds like fun. Quality fun.

“Rabbit Hole,” which concerns a family struggling to recover from the death of a child, is not in the same vein. In addition to his obvious talents, it turns out that Lindsay-Abaire has range.  He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t care how he won the Pulitzer (in a decision that overruled the panel recommendations), he’s just glad he won.

McNulty seemingly wants us to support playwrights because they are daring.  I have seen those sorts of plays — lots of them — and their unconventionality often translates into a conventional dullness. I became a playwright because of the lure of theatre of the absurd, but somehow experimentation led to an alternative theatre movement split largely between “language plays” that are ironically devoid of meaning, and camp theatre revolving solely around one meaning. Neither provides the shock of the new.

There are theatres (mostly small ones) doing new plays that shock and entertain; he’s listed a few of them. I hope that if any of those playwrights goes on to write a good, strong play that happens to win a Pulitzer, we don’t condemn it for being too conventional.

Janeane Garofalo, Henry Rollins, and Marc Maron doing non-standup at The Silent Movie Theatre (?).

I would go see this if a) it weren’t tech week for that one-act festival you’re invited to, and  b) I weren’t then out of town at the state Democratic convention.