Chairman Al (hot commodity) | 5 years ago | March 30, 2001 | Dan Kennedy looked at America’s love affair with Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan.
"In the R-rated webzine Nerve, Maggie Cutler (a/k/a Kitty Lyons) fantasized last year about having sex with Chairman Al. Early in the, uh, mating process he tells her seductively, ‘Past successes are not to be taken as a guarantee of future performance....’
"Three years ago, the New Republic reported that employees of a Wall Street bond-trading company had built a Greenspan shrine with photos, quotations, and a chair the great man had once sat in. It turned out that this tale was one of the elaborate fabrications of soon-to-be-exposed staff writer Stephen Glass. When the article first appeared, though, such devotion seemed so natural that no one even questioned it.
“Fans have created Web sites in Greenspan’s honor. Imus refers to him as ‘Crazy Al.’ The New Yorker has told us that he reads briefing papers while sitting in the tub for an hour or two every morning. NPR has reported that more people have heard of Greenspan than the lead singer for the boy group ’N Sync. The Samuel Adams beer company claims it has conducted a poll showing that, even after the recent stock-market woes, beer drinkers would rather ‘toast’ than ‘roast’ Greenspan by 50 percent to 30 percent.”
Name Game | 10 years ago | March 29, 1996 | Caroline Knapp couldn’t call her boyfriend’s parents by their first names.
“Everybody else calls them Frank and Louise — the boyfriend’s sister-in-law, the boyfriend’s pals, often even the boyfriend himself. But it feels way too casual to me. This is particularly true with Frank, as Frank is the sort of name that sounds best if it’s preceded by a really informal word, such as ‘Yo.’ Yo Frank! Sounds good in theory, but you can’t say that to your boyfriend’s father, can you?...
“If some names sound too familiar, others sound ridiculously formal. I’d be a terrible White House correspondent because I’d feel like such a moron calling the president ‘Mr. President.’ It sounds inane and artificial, like calling the guy who cleans your teeth ‘Mr. Dentist.’ I feel the same way about such titles as ‘Mr. Speaker’ and ‘Your Majesty.’ Saying them aloud would make me squirm.
“... I think a lot of these decisions go beyond the question of what sounds formal and what sounds familiar. What’s often at work are murkier issues about distance and closeness, about how much symbolic space you feel compelled to insert between yourself and the person you’re addressing. The boyfriend’s parents, for example, would really like me to call them Frank and Louise. They’d really like me to be a part of the family, to feel comfortable taking a seat — literally and figuratively — at the family table and becoming a member of the tribe. Calling them by the names everyone else in the extended family uses would signal to them a willingness on my part to make that transition, to shift from an outsider’s position to an insider’s, to slide naturally into the shared language of a clan.”
