Nothing could be further from the truth.
The reality is that, in stock car racing, the guy who wins the race is
almost always the one who dominates the race. Last-lap, come-from-behind
victories are quite rare. They happen, but definitely not “usually.” That’s
true for every form of racing, from local dirt tracks to the big-dollar
NASCAR circuit.

Perhaps the vice president is suffering from yet another delusion of rural
Tennessee life: After a hard week of stripping and putting up tobacco, young Al would amble on down to the local dirt track and soak up the last-lap victories.

Or maybe not. But one thing’s for sure: Al Gore ain’t no Dale Earnhardt.

– Bill Greene

Arlington, Va.

Gore did not boast to anyone, off the record or
not, about being a model for Oliver in “Love Story.” A Tennessee newspaper
first noted the “Love Story” connection, which the New York Times proceeded
to bollix up.

And speaking of myths: Since when is the entire nation suffering from “Clinton
fatigue”? Not the persons I’ve dealt with. What they have suffered from is
an anger at the 24-7 media, which, since corporate and political
strictures prevent it from dealing with substantive issues, turn to trash to
make money. I suggest that the real issue is this: Big Media is pissed as hell at the
idea that it no longer has quite the opinion-molding power that it thought it did. In their frustrated fury, the media sharks are now trying to smear Al Gore,
and they don’t care how many lies they print in order to do it.

– Tamara Baker

The real problem: We want Al Gore to be the statesman we like to think his father was. And we get good talk, big ideas; but Al Jr.’s actions seldom measure up to the talk. Gore needs to convince us that he has a better attention span than Clinton, and that he will seriously address issues such as
poverty that have been largely ignored during the past seven years. We want Gore to be the fulfillment of what we thought was the Clinton promise now squandered. But he is not. And so we make fun of him.

– Dale Madren

Are we supposed to be impressed by Al Gore’s use of Dr. Shettles’ “How to
Choose the Sex of Your Baby”? I find it rather disturbing that he wastes
his time with such pseudoscientific literature. Perhaps Gore would have done better to have read a book on overpopulation instead, rather than irresponsibly increasing the size of his family so
that he could have a son.

– Travis Hime

Chaos in Kosovo
BY LAURA ROZEN

(08/04/99)

Obviously it’s time for another “humanitarian intervention” in
Kosovo — this time against the Kosovar Albanians. Then when we’ve put
the Serbs back in power, we can bomb them again. Then maybe it’ll be
time to be humane to the Macedonians …

– Jim Crutchfield

Newport News, Va.

Dear Mr. Blue: Porn widow
BY GARRISON KEILLOR

(08/03/99)

Garrison Keillor’s advice to the “porn widow” whose husband is spending four
hours a night and $200 a month viewing online sex was particularly
bone-headed. Normally, Keillor is able to dispense his wisdom with minimal
damage, but not so in this case. This woman is appealing for help because
her husband is neglecting her for a nightly rendezvous with images on a
screen. Telling her to join him and to try to find “better
deals” to hold down the costs is like telling an alcoholic’s spouse to quit
whining and try to help the falling-down drunk become a “control drinker.”
It just won’t work. The lame advice in this case not only leaves
this porn widow with less of a clue than before, but it also promotes the
collective denial of tens of thousands of other addicted to pornography.

I suspect that Keillor’s disregard for the seriousness of this couple’s
problem is based at least partly on a hesitancy to appear prudish on the
topic of pornography. But putting aside any arguments of whether naked bodies
doing what they do best is moral or immoral, just look at the mechanics of
this couple’s situation. I would venture that doing anything for four hours
a night that costs $200 per month and threatens your marriage is simply
out-of-control behavior. What would his advice have been if the woman had complained that her husband spent that much time and money just watching television?

– Liam Rooney

Will a Barbie computer make math easy?
BY JANELLE BROWN

(08/04/99)

Janelle Brown notes that Mattel’s Barbie computer, but not its Hot Wheels
computer, will include typing and writing software, and asks what messages
a girl will get from the presence of such software. I wonder what
messages a boy will get from its absence.

Believe it or not, not all boys grow up to be manual laborers. A few take
jobs that require writing skills. If Brown insists on believing
otherwise, at least she should stop presenting such a belief as
enlightened feminism, when it is anything but.

– David J. Edmondson

Washington

I found Janelle Brown’s article on Barbie/Hot Wheels
computers extremely sexist. Brown never seemed to
realize that a Hot Wheels computer could easily be
given to a girl and vice versa; she seems to push the idea that
Barbie means “girl” and Hot Wheels means “boy.” It is people like her who have it so
ingrained in their heads that Barbie equates to “girl”
that are truly forcing sexism on the younger
generation.

– Andrea Hawksley

Sharps & flats: “Philadelphonic”
REVIEWED BY JOE HEIM
(08/03/99)

I found myself cringing at Joe Heim’s attack on a white musician’s choice to play blues and
experiment with different sounds — to be a “cultural interloper.” I haven’t
heard the new album, but I am familiar with Garrett Dutton’s music,
lyrics and vocal style, and yes, they fall into what is usually the domain of black
artists. But unlike, say, Vanilla Ice, he does not pretend to have had a
difficult childhood, to be tough, to be “down with the ‘hood”; he
doesn’t promote violence or gangster life; he doesn’t even use excessive street
slang. Instead, he expresses love for his hometown, family and friends (bourgeois
though they may be); he describes the joy and sadness he has experienced. I
don’t think anyone who has actually paid attention to Dutton’s lyrics
would call him a poseur.

I can accept that Heim does not like G. Love’s music; what I find
ridiculous is that he offers no valid argument to back up his distaste for it. He seems
simply to have a problem with white boys playing black
music. He even goes as far as to state that Dutton “wants to be … very, very
black.” Does he really?

– Elizabeth Einstein

Cut me open!
BY JEAN HANFF KORELITZ

(08/02/99)

and

Give me drugs!
BY NINA SHAPIRO
(08/03/99)

and

Take me to a hospital!
BY SUSAN GERHARD
(08/04/99)

Jean Hanff Korelitz has a good message to deliver — that it’s no failure
to give birth by Caesarean section. Two interesting facts that her readers
might be interested to know: Since Jan. 1, 1998, federal law has required insurers to pay for a 48-hour hospital stay after childbirth; and the maternal death
rate for Caesarean births is four times higher than for vaginal births.

– Pete Danko

Applegate Valley, Ore.

After my first (emergency) Caesarean section, a neighbor came up to me and said how sorry she was. I couldn’t believe it — my daughter and I would have died without that
C-section; and were it not for fetal monitoring, my daughter would have
been born with brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. How could anyone
be “sorry” about that outcome?

Too much of the “natural birth” movement is a vain effort by women to
exert control over the uncontrollable. The tragedy is that they do not
realize how they are endangering their babies by this attitude.

– Cathie Fornssler

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

I‘m all for Caesarean
sections when they are necessary, but to have one
because it’s more convenient for the mother seems irresponsible. It’s
major surgery, which means it’s expensive and invasive.
Until this article, I believed that no responsible doctor would
schedule a Caesarean just because a patient asked for it, and that no
mother would actually ask for one without good cause. How can the author compare a teeny vaginal tear to an incision that slices through seven layers of tissue?

Also: Labor pain isn’t that bad. I’ve had two births without epidurals and they were horrible and wonderful, sort of like parenting. As they say, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

– Eileen Bordy

The cult of pain which glorifies “natural childbirth” prevents many women from
seeking relief and makes others feel ashamed of having sought that relief.
An epidural would have made the birth of my 9-pound, 12-ounce son a less horrifying
experience. By the time he finally emerged I was too exhausted and shaken to
appreciate the miracle. By contrast, my daughter’s birth two years later was
pain-free and completely joyous. I was able to leave the hospital within 24
hours and felt “up to the task” of caring for my children at home.

– Justine van Engen

I am truly sorry that Susan Gerhard felt like her homebirth and her midwife were not to her liking. Homebirth and midwifery care is, obviously, not for everyone. But it is a choice for 1 to 2 percent of women, despite the obstacles insurance companies throw in their way.

In my experience as a midwife as well as a childbirth educator (I’ve spent 12 years
teaching home as well as hospital couples), women who are cared for by a
homebirth attendant are much more satisfied with their prenatal care and
births than those in an institutional setting. Gerhard was just one disgruntled client who did not take
charge of her own situation despite warning signs all along the way.

I am a Certified Professional Midwife, and I pride myself
on detecting the occasional dissatisfaction from a client; intuition is
one of the “services” I provide. Had Gerhard been my client, I trust I would
have been aware that this was not working and we would have explored how
best to meet her needs — including considering transferring care to a
hospital-based practitioner before labor began.

– Susan Moray

I‘m desperately tired of the past three days’ worth of bashing natural
childbirth, homebirth and midwifery! Please. The natural childbirth movement
is not full of a bunch of activist loonies who aren’t looking out for their
own safety or that of their unborn or about-to-be-born children. Stop
trying to justify an individual choice by bashing others.

– Stephanie Smith

“They just wanted to intimidate me,” Helmberger said. “What did I do to them?” She recovered from the threat in time to sell Ventura-themed St. Patrick’s Day cards last week, but she knows that Ventura for Minnesota Inc. would like to eradicate her cottage industry. The match-up between “The Body” and a self-described “little old lady” from Minnesota may be surreal, but it has brought to the fore a bigger issue: the selling of Jesse Ventura.

What began as an idealistic stab at populist politics has turned into a marketing free-for-all. The merchandising of Minnesota’s governor, which helped finance his Reform Party campaign, hardly abated after the election, despite early promises from Ventura that the cashing-in would subside after he took office. There are now two organizations — Ventura for Minnesota Inc. and the Ventura Volunteer Committee — selling Ventura T-shirts, key chains and, yes, action figures, around the world. It is clear that the people who negotiated Ventura’s victory intend to capitalize on their candidate’s star quality to subsidize future political campaigns, but the ethical boundaries remain fuzzy.

During the course of the campaign, Ventura’s crew became adept at grass-roots marketing and garnering free media attention. Post-election, the stakes are a little higher. Ventura himself unabashedly inked a book deal with Villard Books, for a $500,000 advance, immediately after his victory. He partied like a rock star with Warren Zevon at his inaugural ball, which filled the Target Center arena — Target Stores being a key Minnesota institution, which coincidentally also sell official Ventura merchandise — amid unanswered questions about corporate sponsorship. Ventura continues to book appearances on late-night talk shows, recently trading barbs with David Letterman about personal income. He rationalizes all this self-promotion by saying, “I’m not doing anything I haven’t done before in my career.”

The difference now, of course, is that he is Gov. Ventura. Since 1992, Jesse “The Body” Ventura has been registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which states that the nickname is for “entertainment purposes, namely, personal appearances by an individual to promote professional wrestling.” But who owns the governor? The ethical questions that dogged former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had to slither away from his own book deal in 1995, haven’t so far plagued Ventura. With Gingrich, the uproar came from a feeling he was capitalizing on his political fame to profit personally. With Ventura, it may be that Minnesotans feel Jesse was famous before they voted him in.

But some remain uneasy with the money grubbing. Frank Sorauf, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Minnesota, said Ventura has shirked usual political standards. “The beauty of Jesse Ventura, because he is virtuous himself and a self-proclaimed honest man, is that he can take money from anybody and it won’t corrupt him,” Sorauf said sardonically. By personally profiting while in office, or even raising political money off his pop-culture status, Sorauf believes, Ventura degrades the perceived populism of his victory and further taints politics. “At least Bill Clinton did not sell a bumper sticker that said, ‘I slept in the Lincoln Bedroom,’” Sorauf said.

Ventura relies on two different entities to hawk his image. One is Ventura for Minnesota Inc., a nonprofit corporation made up of three Minnesota companies licensed to sell post-campaign merchandise. Its board of directors consists of campaign manager Doug Friedline, Terry Ventura (wife of the governor) and campaign chair Dean Barkley. According to Friedline, the product has sold well in two months at Target, and the official Jesse Ventura Web site is pushing three different Ventura action figures as “Governor,” “Navy SEAL” and “Coach,” to be shipped in April.

The Minnesota campaign finance board determined this month that Ventura for Minnesota Inc. is not a political entity, and therefore does not need to follow campaign finance laws, as long as profits are not used for any campaign. Indeed, Friedline has maintained all along that the nonprofit exists to serve as a charitable organization, though no charitable donations have yet been made. Ventura for Minnesota can also finance “constituent services,” covering the governor’s expenses where the state governor’s budget fails to do so. What exactly may fall under this category is unclear to both the state board and Ventura for Minnesota, though get-out-the-vote events in schools are one possibility. “Truth is, nobody’s clear on it,” said Gary Goldsmith, assistant director of the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board. “We’ll see what comes up in the future.” Also, Ventura for Minnesota serves to keep Ventura in the spotlight to positive effect. “It might enhance his name, certainly,” said Goldsmith. “Any donation will bear the name of this company, and that may affect his chances in any future races.”

The second key Ventura marketing enterprise is the Ventura Volunteer Committee, formerly known as Ventura for Governor, which is most definitely a campaign committee. Under the new ruling, the campaign entity can purchase any merchandise from Ventura for Minnesota and sell it specifically for campaign use. “The function of Ventura for Minnesota, as presented to us, was first, to protect the governor’s name and then to exist as a charitable organization,” Goldsmith says. “But the campaign committee can certainly sell this merchandise as well, and it’s very commercial.” Ventura defended the entrepreneurial strategy recently at the National Press Club, growling that it is more ethical to sell someone a T-shirt than to ask baldly for a political contribution.

Ventura, Friedline and Barkley thrive in these sorts of uncharted waters. Their gubernatorial campaign survived by selling black headbanger-esque shirts with electric green lettering that said, “Retaliate in ’98: Ventura for Governor.” All told, the Ventura for Governor entity spent about $600,000 (most of which was state money that came after the election); campaign treasurer Bob Maline estimated that nearly $150,000 came in T-shirt sales. Ventura’s two major opponents, Democrat Skip Humphrey and Republican Norm Coleman, each spent within a whisker of the state cap of $2.1 million, a figure that doesn’t include “soft” money, which bumped spending for each campaign up another couple of million. By contrast, Ventura for Governor adhered to the Reform Party policy of taking no PAC money and received no national party money.

In mid-January, I visited the Ventura for Governor “headquarters,” which shares the ground level of a north Minneapolis duplex with a hair salon, to witness the selling of Jesse Ventura firsthand. Friedline, a round, bald man with a walrus mustache and rimless bifocals, dropped a heavy stack of merchandise orders on the table. “It’s more than two months after the election,” Friedline said, “and we’re still filling 25 orders a day. We’re selling campaign stuff all over the country: Vermont, New York, Washington, Florida,” he said. Some come from as far as Egypt and Japan, with just a handful of orders actually originating in Minnesota. The Ventura Volunteer Committee had sold about $75,000 worth of merchandise after the election, Friedline explained, some of it left over from Ventura for Governor, but much of it new merchandise from Ventura for Minnesota.

After the Ventura victory, the campaign couldn’t keep up with orders — or with state laws requiring that names and addresses be collected for political donations exceeding $20. Furthermore, Minnesota campaign laws limiting corporate contributions made it virtually impossible to sell the T-shirts in retail stores. But it was clear that there was money to be made. Thus, Ventura for Minnesota was born.

But others have lined up to profit off Jesse too, with bootleg and parody merchandise still cropping up and Salon columnist Garrison Keillor sharpening his satirical skills — and fattening his wallet — in a new novel that couldn’t possibly be about Jesse Ventura. (Salon’s new Washington correspondent, Jake Tapper, has also just completed a Ventura biography, “Body Slam: The Jesse Ventura Story.”) For her part, Helmberger sold more than 300 St. Patrick’s Day cards featuring Ventura at $2 a pop — with nary a peep from Ventura for Minnesota. “I’m not terribly worried anymore,” she says, insisting that she is firmly within her First Amendment rights to lampoon a political figure. Helmberger has already conceived of Jesse cards for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and even graduation season. “I’ll just keep going until the organization can prove that they can make me stop. Besides, it’s so fun because he’s popular. You couldn’t do this with any other governor.”

Indeed, Ventura remains popular. The most recent polls put Ventura’s approval rating at 72 percent, the highest ever for a Minnesota governor in his first month. Additionally, 74 percent polled approved of Ventura “as a person.”

And popularity is what Ventura for Minnesota is banking on. The relationship between the nonprofit organization selling the merchandise and the campaign committee reselling it, seems dicey at best, with Ventura’s people exploiting a technicality in campaign finance laws to establish a financial base for reelection. But at the same time, Ventura and his minions have no established political base pumping millions of dollars into a constituency, and the Minnesota Reform Party has no affiliation with the National Reform Party — which has hardly supported Ventura before or after the election. What is clear is that Ventura for Minnesota has been given the green light to continue to sell The Body.

While keeping his hand tight around the cult of Jesse, Friedline has admitted that he “has some people in mind” to run in 2000 for the Minnesota Senate seat, and he plans to be involved in seeking a Reform Party candidate for president. Ventura has insisted that he will finish his term as governor, while coyly indicating another campaign for something is possible. A state race is one thing, but could all of this lead to a legitimate presidential run?

Friedline won’t say, but he’s firm that he sees no ethics problems in any of this. “People have thought we are dumb and don’t know anything about politics, but they all underestimate us,” Friedline said. “April will be a big month for us, with the action figure coming out. Then we can rock ‘n’ roll.”