The Wizard of Ooze. (Behind the curtain: Stephen Miller, Generalfeldmarschall, Twatwaffen SS.)
You will recall that Professor Marvel, a.k.a. the Wizard of Oz, traveled by gasbag.
His very distant cousin in humbuggery, the Wizard of Ooze, likewise gets around on hot air, with an assist from other people’s money.
But I don’t expect we’ll see him at the 2025 Albuquerque International Balloon Festival, which begins today. Oh, sure, there’s a golf center at Balloon Fiesta Park, with a driving range and a six-hole pitch-and-putt course. But there is a distinct lack of screening foliage and even the most myopic of Repuglicunts could see him improving his lie.
The Great and Powerful Ooze might send the ICEholes in his stead (darn those bone spurs!). What a fine addition to the spectacle that would be — fats with tats in masks and battle-rattle snatching up brown people and stuffing them into locked baskets beneath unmarked black balloons, to be spirited away to Kansas or someplace even worse, flanked by escorts of flying monkeys.
But I expect those boyos are busy too, lumbering after nekkid bike riders in Stumptown or the more easily caught deep-dish pizza in Chicago.
Eat up, fellas! And don’t worry about the legs on the black olives. Ramón says they’re free-range. Organic.
This picture won’t prove it, but the bosque trail seemed pretty busy for a Tuesday.
Seasonal temps, blue skies, a tailwind for most of the homebound leg … what’s not to like?
It being the birthday of L. Frank Baum, himself a scribe of some small renown, I decided this morning to embark on a journey.
Didn’t make it to the Emerald City (that derned yellow brick road doesn’t appear anywhere on my map), but I did reach the bosque, which has greened up nicely. Standing in for tin men, scarecrows and cowardly lions were cyclists, skaters and joggers.
Temps were seasonal, which is to say in the 80s, and the wind was favorable, pushing me back uphill toward home. No tornado, no balloon, no ruby slippers — just the breeze, the bike and those old black Sidis.
Nov. 22, 1963, may have been the day when I first realized that all was not as it seemed.
I was sitting in front of my fifth-grade class at Randolph AFB outside San Antonio, reading aloud to the other kids (yes, even at age 9 I had the mellifluous speaking voice we have all come to know and love), when The Authorities announced via loudspeaker that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.
That was it for school. Stunned, confused, we trudged home and, with the rest of the world, watched on TV as the young president was buried and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson sworn in to replace him.
Yeah, right. Replace Jack Kennedy. Like that could ever happen.
Forget everything you’ve learned about him since. For a 9-year-old Irish-American, JFK was as good as it got. Like my old man, he’d been in the war; like me, JFK was a swimmer. “PT 109” sailed well ahead of “The Ten Commandments” in my personal mythology, and “Profiles in Courage” may have been the first work of non-fiction that I ever read.
JFK wasn’t some baldheaded old warhorse like President Eisenhower, or a sweaty, shifty-eyed rodent like Richard M. Nixon — he was young, and brash, and when he went eyeball to eyeball with the Commies, guess who blinked first? Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, that’s who. Made it a little easier to crouch under the desk during duck-and-cover drills, knowing that Jack had our back.
Then, in a wink of an eye, he was dead. Gone. And some jug-eared Texican was calling himself the president. LBJ used Randolph as a landing strip whenever he had a hankerin’ to visit the ranch, and we went to see him a time or two, but it felt like bullshit to me. This guy was the president? Says fuckin’ who?
In the October-November issue of AARP The Magazine, Bob Schieffer recalls covering the assassination as night police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He likens the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy to a key scene in “The Wizard of Oz.”
Remember how the movie started out in black-and-white, and then Dorothy opens her front door into this vibrant Technicolor? That’s how I think of the Kennedy administration. He brought style and grace, and inspired a generation to do something for their country.
I’ll carry that a step further. The assassination of John F. Kennedy revealed to some of us, for the first time, that there is a man behind the curtain, a shadowy, furtive figure that warrants our close and undivided attention, no matter what the Wizard says up front.
And while the Wizard loves to work his magic in rich, warm colors, the world often shows itself to us most truly in stark black and white.
• Editor’s note: As you might expect, Charles P. Pierce has some thoughts on this subject, too.
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