You'll Say What We Tell You to Say

I felt so sorry for Sarah Murdoch last night getting fed the wrong information  about who really won Australia’s top model. I’ve been studying pictures of her face as she’s being told by live feed that she just announced the wrong name to millions of people. It reminded me of George Bush’s face on 9/11 when he lingered in that classroom glancing through a book about a goat after his Chief of Staff came in and whispered news of the attacks to him. Conspiracy theorists like my friend from yesterday’s post point to that as evidence that he knew; that it was no surprise to him that the attacks had begun which is why he was able to stay through the presentation anyway with the kids sounding out their words and reading right along like pros, all shiny and sweet and sitting up straight, but to me it’s just human that he sat there. I mean, it was a classroom, and a teacher was talking. You don’t stand up and rush out when a teacher is talking, especially when his aides didn't come in and hurry him away. It must feel pretty powerful at times to be the President but I think we all know the guy has to defer to the many experts keeping him up to date on what's really going down.I feel for anyone whose utterances get managed from some out-of-sight ‘Control Room.’ It’s true I never worked for a paper, never sat in an office or served on a staff. I was always just out there riding on a smile and a shoeshine as Willy Loman says, trying to sell my column to anyone who'd buy it. And now I write this blog too just like millions of other people, all of us doing our part to fill the atmosphere with A WHOLE LOT OF CONVERSATION, which, besides the ability to accessorize, as somebody says in “Steel Magnolias,” is the main thing that differentiates us from the animals. :-)I can't find Olympia Dukakis as Clairee saying that particular thing but here she is saying something  equally wry:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uc9Kn_3XJg]