I recently bought a PDA, in order to better organize my busy schedule.  I have a family of four, teach school, write for Being There, play in a couple of bands, DJ weddings and proms, and I’m running for President in 2008.  There’s just a lot to do.  So when a friend of mine was buying a new palm pilot and selling his old HP handheld, I figured that might be a good tool for me to use to keep everything straight.  I’m not good about writing things down, but I like computers and gadgets enough that I hoped I would have incentive to change my habits.  So far, it’s worked like a charm.  I have all my appointments, gigs, deadlines, and press conferences all lined up.  (Ok, no press conferences yet, but 2008 is still a ways off.  And when I do have a press conference, it’ll be logged into my PDA).  In the last month, I’ve found I’ve taken care of things more efficiently than ever before.

But I’m not here to sell you a PDA (though you can click the link to the right if you’re interested).   You see, all this effort to organize my life has me thinking about ways others could be more efficient as well.  So, I’d just like to make a few friendly suggestions to some people that I think are missing opportunities to accomplish their goals in a more expedient fashion.

My first suggestion is to the Catholic Church.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I think I should say here that I’m not Catholic.  So I understand why my suggestions might be suspect.  But I think maybe the Catholic Church could use an outsider’s eyes on this one because this is something that, frankly, I don’t think you guys have considered.  It all hit me while I was watching the news during the days following the death of Pope John Paul II.  On one of those days, when I was tuning in to find out all the new developments in the Michael Jackson trial, Cardinal Law was leading a mass in honor of the pope at the Vatican.  In case you didn’t know, Cardinal Law is the former US archbishop who did such a bang up job shuffling priests who had been accused of molestation around to other parishes.  He was allowed to flee to Rome a couple years back, where he now has a fairly prestigious job.

Anyway, there was Cardinal Law leading a mass on the news.  So, I was picking my jaw up off the floor (it had gone all slack at the realization that a man who helped pedophiles escape justice was given such a high honor), and that’s when I realized that there’s a real organizational problem in all of this.  There’s a void that’s been left behind in the US by Cardinal Law’s absence.  Who’s going to relocate priests accused of molestation now?  And then I had it; Michael Jackson could do it.  All he needs to do is convert, and then you’ve got your…man.  That would tie up al sorts of loose ends.  Once the trial ends, and now that his music career’s in the toilet, he needs a new gig.  He already knows a lot about the job.  And the media wouldn’t have to pick and choose which scandal to report on.  They could cover both scandals at the same time.  That’s a little something called synergy.

My second suggestion is for the ever-growing army of politicos from the far right and far left who dominate the nation’s talk shows and news magazines with their never-ending recitations of talking points from the RNC and DNC.  This includes the politicians themselves, as well as the spokespersons, reporters, anchors, lobbyists, and (as Eric Alterman terms it) the punditocracy at large.  There was a time (before the advent of the 24-hour cable news network) when there were just a few of you to keep track of, and you were limited in your exposure to nightly news broadcasts on the major networks and PBS.  How I long for those days.  As it stands now, you’re on all the time on a dozen channels.  There’s so many of you saying the same exact things that the only way you have a hope to stand out from the crowd is by reciting the talking points louder and at a higher pitch.  You people give me a headache.  It takes an enormous amount of time to get through all of your redundant utterances to find the smallest speck of original thought.  And the views presented have become so polarized that no effort at all is paid to finding common ground upon which to move forward.  It’s a colossal waste of time.

But fear not, for I have the answer.  Here’s what you do.  All of the pundits, puppets, and politicians from the far right will have their left arms surgically removed.  Their counterpoints on the far left will have their right arms removed.  Then you won’t have to even open your mouths on television to let us know where you stand on the issues.  We’ve all heard the talking points repeated ad nauseum for years; we know what your arguments are going to be before you make them.  But with my suggestion, when a topic is introduced, you will only have to appear on screen with whichever arm you have left, and the viewing public will know at a glance which wing you use.  They may also notice that with only one wing you fly in circles, but you were doing that anyway.  Now, instead of having to listen to you for half an hour, we can simply check in to see that you still disagree with each other, then watch something more mentally stimulating—like a NASCAR race.  Some of you may be wondering what I would suggest removing from the true moderates who eschew the polemics of the punditocracy.  My response to that is that this editorial is about practical solutions to real problems, not hypothetical situations.  As soon as a real centrist forms from the primordial ooze currently passing itself off as “debate” on TV news, I’ll be happy to consider your question.

Finally, I have a suggestion for President Bush, who has recently made some rather controversial appointments to high-profile positions.  First, he appointed former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to head up the World Bank.  This is the same Paul Wolfowitz who went on national television after the invasion of Iraq was months underway (and no weapons of mass destruction had been found) and said flatly that WMDs were never the main reason we invaded in the first place, but that it was an issue that Americans would rally behind.  That Paul Wolfowitz.  The guy who makes Rumsfeld look moderate (see paragraph above).  Then, he tapped John Bolton to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.  This is the man who said a couple of years ago that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”  He went on to say that leveling the top ten floors of the UN headquarters in New York would make no difference, and that the US should be the only permanent member of the UN Security Council.  That’s called being a uniter, and not a divider.

I look at these two, and the only conclusion that I can come to is that Bush is trying to annoy the rest of the world.  If that’s really his goal (and how he can hope to achieve anything else with Wolfowitz and Bolton is completely beyond me), then I’d suggest he’s taking a long way around to accomplish it.  With such controversial appointments, there are weeks of bickering on TV news magazines (see two paragraphs above), Senate debates, possible filibusters, and general turmoil.  And that’s just inside the US.  If Bush wanted to piss off the rest of the planet, he could have done so much more quickly.  I offer the following suggestion the next time he wants to throw the nation’s weight around:  Send an e-mail to the leaders of all the world’s nations with a picture of Bush giving them the finger.  He doesn’t even have to snap a new photo; he can just recycle this one from when he was running for governor in Texas a few years back.



The e-mail won’t waste paper, and he can send it to his whole address book with one click.  That way, he can get his message across in one fell swoop, all in a matter of minutes.  Not only will this accomplish Bush’s goal, but it will also give all those soon-to-be one-armed pundits something to shout about until the rest of my suggestions are put into practice.  Of course, Wolfowitz or Bolton may quit before Bush’s term is up, in which case he will have to find someone else.  If the Catholic Church decides not to take my advice, and if he’s out of prison by then, maybe Michael Jackson would be interested.  He could use some diplomatic immunity.

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