Poodle Whines on Walz, Vance, O’Bama, Teabags, and Weather

ODDZ-N-ENDZ:  I spent the better part of Sunday morning strip-mining the lint deposits accumulating in the crevices of my couch — yes, my latest love interest — for a spare $5,000. That was the entry fee to the Tim Walz fundraiser held at the Montecito manse of some billionaires I somehow have not met yet. 

In case the name Walz is not ringing your bell, he’s running for VP on the Democratic ticket and was recovering from his debate with his Republican counterpart, JD Vance, held a few nights prior. 

Vance famously makes a big deal about how he rose above his traumatic Appalachian origins — replete with gun-toting meemaw and junkie mom. For such efforts, he is now being denounced by one of his cousins, a real McCoy hillbilly from West Virginia and the daughter of a black-lung victim whose sternum got crushed in a coal-mining accident. She refers to Vance as a “shillbilly” — a not-so-subtle dig at his best-seller, Hillbilly Elegy — and notes, devastatingly, I’d say, that Vance cleans his cast-iron skillet by putting it in the dishwasher.

Alas — or is that alack? — my couch proved less than forthcoming, so I went over to a neighborhood friend’s instead, thinking we might share a few fingers of some Celtically unpronounceable amber liquid while sunning ourselves in the merciful bubble of Santa Barbara in the fall. 

No Hurricane Helene here. No Hurricane Milton hyperventilating in the warmup circle. Better yet, no crazy right-wing conspiracy theories involving Jews and illegal immigrants and disaster relief funds that mysteriously disappeared, no doubt abducted by UFOs, from which the weather-altering laser beams some Congressional members of the GOP swear are to blame, either. (I only wish I was making this up.) 

My friend, it turns out, had to dog-sit for a friend who was moderating a City Council candidates forum all about the arts. Since the forum happened to be at the Community Arts Workshop (CAW) — one of Santa Barbara’s many hiding-in-plain-sight miracles we all take for granted — I figured I’d go. It’s one of the best indoor-outdoor spaces in town. Since the subject was art, not rent control or e-bikes or cars on State Street, I figured something personal and real might accidentally be said.

Besides, I didn’t want to chase after some vice-presidential candidate — no matter how great he seems — on such a criminally beautiful day. Last time I tried that was May 2017, and Joe Biden was in town, chilling at the Canary Hotel, waiting to be interviewed by Oprah. Hillary Clinton had just lost to Donald Trump, and Joe was itching to tell the world that he should have run instead. He actually would have won that one. 

To be honest, I didn’t really want to talk to Joe, but I figured I was professionally obligated to try. I walked up every floor — no elevators for this man — and down every hallway, looking for muscular guys in tight jackets with squiggly wires emanating out of their earholes. Reporting is not rocket science. Sure enough, I found them. 

I walked up with a Gomer Pyle smile of beatific stupidity plastered on my face and asked if I might have a few words with the Vice President. But I didn’t really want to talk to Joe. And they obliged me. 

Mostly, I was amazed at how excruciatingly good-looking they all were. Not just one or two, but every one of them. It was a little late in my life — I know that’s trendy now — but I wondered if I was going to have to reevaluate my whole sexual preference thing. While I pondered how I’d find the time — I was much busier then — I quickly found myself surrounded, swarmed, and escorted to the elevator. Together, we all got in and went down to the lobby and out the door. Naturally, I went back in. Naturally, they were there waiting for me. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk to Joe. It’s that I couldn’t.

Reader alert: I feel compelled here to take a jarring parenthetical detour. Biden served as Vice President to Barack “O’Bama” — America’s first Black Irish president. You may remember Obama passed something known as Obamacare, since bastardized into yet another incomprehensible three-letter acronym: ACA. That stands for the Affordable Care Act, which is something Trump has famously said he has “a concept” for how he’d change it, which is faux-failed-billionaire slang meaning he’d like to “kill” it when he’s not otherwise passing tax cuts so billionaires can buy more things they don’t really need, such as buying out the Bacara for the weekend, the way Jeff Bezos recently did. 

Back then — 2009-ish — Obama and Obamacare energized something called the Tea Party into vein-throbbing paroxysms — how’s that for a Scrabble word? — of sputtering outrage. I remember busloads of these people — conspicuouslywell-heeled and well-coiffed residents of the Santa Ynez Valley — coming to our Santa Barbara screaming their heads off at the walls of then-Congressmember’s Lois Capps’s offices. 

Today, no one remembers the Tea Party, but it was Obama who made them go away. He made fun of them by calling them “The Teabaggers.” This happens to be a term of art describing a quasi-sexual act. Although it is not inherently a gay thing, it was John Waters, the gay filmmaker/auteur/provocateur who brought it into common parlance with his movie Pecker. 

So overwhelmed by their raging homophobia, Tea Party members disbanded and totally disappeared. They have, however reincarnated and now wear red baseball caps and talk rot about stolen elections, dog-eating immigrants, and FEMA conspiracies.

For the record, the arts forum for City Council candidates was the best forum ever. You should have been there. I was. And it didn’t cost me $5,000, either.