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Who's Crazier, Tom Cruise or George Bush?
As some of you know, one of my favorite stories has the great Zen master Shunryu Suzuki being asked at a public talk to summarize Buddhism in a sentence. The audience laughed at the impossibility of that challenge. “Easy,” he said. “Things change.”
Yes. They do. Once Tom Cruise was the biggest star in the world. Now--just a few months from his peak--he's semi-poison at the box office. Why? Stuff like this, as reported by the great Roger Friedman:
Katie's parents, Martin and Kathleen Holmes, didn’t get to see baby Suri up close and personal until the day of the "Mission: Impossible 3" premiere in Los Angeles. That would have been May 4. Suri was born in the late afternoon on April 17.
You do the math, fans. That's two and a half weeks. The Holmeses were specifically not invited until Tom was back home in Los Angeles after his worldwide promotional tour and could monitor the baby’s first visit with her maternal grandparents.
Tom’s mother, Mary Jo Mapother-South, was there for the delivery. So were Tom’s sisters. But, as widely reported, the Holmeses were at their vacation home in Florida when they got the news that their daughter had given birth to their first grandchild. "They are heartbroken,” says the source who filled me in on this, and this person knows what they’re talking about.
Cruise may never recover. Not, anyway, until he lets poor Katie Holmes out for an unsupervised walk with the baby and sees if she comes back. Not until he stops pushing Scientology in every public appearance. Hell, probably not until he has sex with a woman on national TV.
Bush? Strangely, he's better off--even though his approval rating is down to a near-record 29 percent. But guess what? He can get his numbers up quickly. For one thing, it appears that most of our citizens think it's quite a good thing for the government to have a record of every phone call they've made--and they really don't care if the government looked at reporters' phone records to find out who they called. As for the Mexicans who are here illegally, lots of our countrymen seem to favor the view that came around last week, in an e-mail falsely credited to Robin Williams:
All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of whom or where they are. They're illegal!!!
Frightening? Well, only if you have something to hide. Or live in a state where there are lots of Mexicans who do things for you at less than the minimum wage. Otherwise, totalitarianism is looking pretty good. And so we can expect Bush soon to be more popular--at home, that is; outside our borders, the President's idea of an action movie doesn't play so well--than Tom Cruise.
The critical difference: Cruise is an actor. The number of lives he can actually wreck seem limited--his wife and baby, for starters and enders. But Bush can put 10,000 men on the Mexican border with their guns trained on illegals. He can bomb Iran. He can grind it out in Iraq until we rack up numbers of wounded and dead that make it right to compare Iraq to Vietnam.
Who's crazier? Bush gets my vote. Tom Cruise for President?
Yes. They do. Once Tom Cruise was the biggest star in the world. Now--just a few months from his peak--he's semi-poison at the box office. Why? Stuff like this, as reported by the great Roger Friedman:
Katie's parents, Martin and Kathleen Holmes, didn’t get to see baby Suri up close and personal until the day of the "Mission: Impossible 3" premiere in Los Angeles. That would have been May 4. Suri was born in the late afternoon on April 17.
You do the math, fans. That's two and a half weeks. The Holmeses were specifically not invited until Tom was back home in Los Angeles after his worldwide promotional tour and could monitor the baby’s first visit with her maternal grandparents.
Tom’s mother, Mary Jo Mapother-South, was there for the delivery. So were Tom’s sisters. But, as widely reported, the Holmeses were at their vacation home in Florida when they got the news that their daughter had given birth to their first grandchild. "They are heartbroken,” says the source who filled me in on this, and this person knows what they’re talking about.
Cruise may never recover. Not, anyway, until he lets poor Katie Holmes out for an unsupervised walk with the baby and sees if she comes back. Not until he stops pushing Scientology in every public appearance. Hell, probably not until he has sex with a woman on national TV.
Bush? Strangely, he's better off--even though his approval rating is down to a near-record 29 percent. But guess what? He can get his numbers up quickly. For one thing, it appears that most of our citizens think it's quite a good thing for the government to have a record of every phone call they've made--and they really don't care if the government looked at reporters' phone records to find out who they called. As for the Mexicans who are here illegally, lots of our countrymen seem to favor the view that came around last week, in an e-mail falsely credited to Robin Williams:
All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of whom or where they are. They're illegal!!!
Frightening? Well, only if you have something to hide. Or live in a state where there are lots of Mexicans who do things for you at less than the minimum wage. Otherwise, totalitarianism is looking pretty good. And so we can expect Bush soon to be more popular--at home, that is; outside our borders, the President's idea of an action movie doesn't play so well--than Tom Cruise.
The critical difference: Cruise is an actor. The number of lives he can actually wreck seem limited--his wife and baby, for starters and enders. But Bush can put 10,000 men on the Mexican border with their guns trained on illegals. He can bomb Iran. He can grind it out in Iraq until we rack up numbers of wounded and dead that make it right to compare Iraq to Vietnam.
Who's crazier? Bush gets my vote. Tom Cruise for President?
