The Clinton Administration in 50 Words or Less

With Bill and Hillary Clinton in the White House, the last eight years of the 20th Century were banner years for the U.S. There were no wars, gasoline and housing was affordable and there were plenty of jobs to go around. These are facts that most Americans have completely forgotten.

Author's Note: 3-23-14: So what? Even a baby boomer like me can be fooled.

"Nash Bridges" in More Words Than It Deserves

This was a pathetic 1990's television crime drama that even ran into the 21st Century before viewers finally realized that this stupid, sleazy series portrayed The San Francisco Police Department as a bunch of liberal freaks who couldn't keep it zipped long enough to arrest anyone, especially if the suspects represented the city's GLBT "community".

Star Don Johnson, almost but not quite reinventing his Miami Vice role as Detective Sonny Crockett, portrayed Nash Bridges, a skirt chaser whose misplaced priorities made him love everyone just so damn much that the fine line between right and wrong, and good and evil, seemed to get in the way of his hooking up with yet another woman. An unconventional woman, of course, by looks and trade, who'd fall for the expensive, offbeat ensembles he sported and that annoying, raspy laugh and agree to a mutually anticipated one-night-stand. Quite often, she was also the criminal he was investigating. No conflict of interest there, of course, according to the 1990's "anything goes" rules. More often than not, she wised up and skedaddled like someone who had a brain. So, Nash, persistent as a dog with two erections, simply rubbed out that line and never looked back.

Nash Bridges had a partner and side-kick, naturally. Character Joe Dominguez was played by veteran cheesy comic actor Cheech Marin who gave up his quest for the ultimate marijuana high to portray an aging Hispanic-American Yuppie who worshiped the shallow and artificial world of Yuppie things. Like wearing over-priced, hideous-looking suits, driving top-of-the-line European automobiles and making money hand-over-fist off other unsuspecting Yuppies, whether they were members of San Francisco's GLBT "community" or not. Before "Nash Bridges" aired, Cheech Marin made you laugh as a lazy, unambitious lover of life. But, as part of the "Nash Bridges" cast, he made you want to puke.

Nash ran the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of the SFPD where Joe was his next-in-command. This unit evolved over time as people came and went from the show. Some of them were good investigators (characters Harvey Leek, Bryn Carson and Michelle Chan, portrayed by Jeff Perry, Mary Mara and Kelly Hu) and some of them were nothing more than walking erections, like Inspector Evan Cortez, portrayed by Jaime Gomez, and Rick Bettina, played by Daniel Roebuck. Evan's round-the-clock, skirt-chasing exploits made Nash's nocturnal prowling look innocent by comparison. Evan Cortez and his string of female targets, including the first ex-wife and daughter of his boss, Nash Bridges, almost single-handedly transformed "Nash Bridges" from a TV crime drama into yet another predictable, sordid, formulaic soap.

One of the soapiest (and creepiest) things about "Nash Bridges" was Nash's father, Nick Bridges, portrayed by James Gammon. This was the seediest and most aggravating part of the show for me. Nash's two ex-wives couldn't hold a candle to Nash's raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking, skirt-chasing father for making lots of soapy trouble. Instead of being an old man with Alzheimer's, aging gracefully and enjoying what family and time he had left, Nick Bridges was the old man from hell and any old woman's worst nightmare. Nick Bridges couldn't keep it zipped, either, and this seemed to be a feature of this sleazy series that apparently attracted a lot of sick fans. Instead of being a grandfather who smoked a pipe in his slippers and easy chair, Nick Bridges was a dirty old man whose addiction to women, cards, cigars, and the ponies made him the perfect anti-flyover grandfather. Just the kind of dad and granddad that makes San Franciscans so proud and so cutting edge, while the rest of America is stuck with upholding the traditional values and virtues of grandfatherhood. No wonder Nash called his father "Nick" instead of "Dad". Apparently, "Dad" is no longer cool in America the Beautiful.

This ludicrous show almost seemed to go out of its way to convince American viewers that it was perfectly all right to let the good times roll and to hell with the consequences. But, every now and then, they would have Nash actually put a bad guy in the slammer temporarily and the bad guy was usually a white heterosexual man who spent an awful lot of money on clothing and fine dining. And that seemed to be the real purpose, albeit underlying, for airing "Nash Bridges". To showcase San Francisco as the jewel of the West Coast and San Franciscans as super-educated and super-cool Yuppies who wore the best labels and frequented all the best restaurants. As if any of that crap ever mattered in life. "Nash Bridges" was a deliberate snub to regular Americans in the fly-over states but no one seemed to get it.

And any stupid, redneck hillbilly from Appalachia could have told you that.

Free Lunch

I used to wonder why white-collar workers in America jumped at every opportunity to attend a conference somewhere. But I finally figured out the real reason why office workers flocked to conferences like flies took to shit way before conferences were even called conferences. I was in the know and even hip about the secret world of conferences and the underground cult of conference goers when most conferences were still called “conventions”.

A convention was an overnight conference held in a hotel in some far away town. Convention goers were bored office workers and frustrated white-collar middle managers who needed a little break from their daily paper-pushing routine and a lot of eagerly anticipated, devilish diversion in someone else’s back yard. Have fun and let someone else clean up the mess afterward became America’s new service-industry corporate motto. This went hand-in-hand with America’s new white-collar corporate mission: Don’t get caught.

When paper-pushing was tossed out the service industry door in the 1990s, along with the single-tasking “pencil necks” who earned their living via telephones and filing cabinets, a new age of multi-tasking “computer keyboarders” and e-mail processors took over. Still, they got just as bored and frustrated as anyone else and needed a night or two on the town. Somebody else’s town, that is, and at the company’s expense. So, they invented "conferences" because the word sounded more progressive and high-end. After all, pencil necks went to conventions to skip convention meetings and to play poker all night long, if a tawdry one-night stand or a schoolboy shaving cream battle wasn’t in the offing. Computer keyboarders, on the other hand, would attend conferences mainly to “eat free food”. As Y2K approached, the all-you-can-eat buffet replaced lascivious carousing and unfettered mischief in white-collar corporate America.

When America’s service industry discovered that its over-tasked office staffs were signing up in droves for free food, managers stopped planning so many big-budget conferences and started offering conferences on the other side of town. Lavish business conferences became simple day-trips to a prepaid food trough.

Windows 95, therefore, spawned the biggest service industry perk of all time. White-collar workers had finally found their gastro G-spot. And no one ever looked back.

Like Disco, the “Free Lunch” had arrived.

Yuppies Through the Keyhole

Yuppies were the Young Upwardly-mobile Professionals in the 1980s and 1990s who basically used to be the hippies of the late 1960s. At some point in time, these incredibly shallow and restless folks decided to give up their pot and beads for cocaine and Rolexes.

The main purpose of being a Yuppie was to cover up your own embarrassing acts of discrimination with discriminating taste. It is suspected that many Yuppies had parents who were the freaky, pre-flower children of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. The main purpose of being a Beatnik was to wear black, listen to flute music and be inscrutable.

By the year 2000, the word Yuppie was simply replaced by the phrase “fat old fool”. The word Beatnik was, in turn, replaced by the phrase “dead fat old fool”.