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Running with Scissors
Augusten Burroughs
Picador

It is comforting to read about a childhood that is, very likely, worse than one’s own. Augusten Burroughs survived an upbringing far more dysfunctional than most one will encounter, unless of course, one works as a psychiatric nurse in a prison for the criminally insane. Come to think of it, after his crazy, Anne-Sexton-wannabe mother foisted him off on her highly unorthodox psychiatrist, to live in his fun house of distorting mental illness at the twee age of thirteen, Burroughs would have made a decent loony bin nurse himself. Instead, he chose writing as his profession, so we all get to revel in the do-do smeared madness.

Running With Scissors is the autobiographical tale of Burroughs’ adolescence in said nut house, in this case a moldering, cockroach-ridden, Victorian house in Northampton, Massachusetts. The house was filled with the biological and adopted offspring of Dr. Finch, who was his mother, Deirdre’s, shrink. Told in the style of a witty, gay teen with too much time on his hands, an overdeveloped fascination for bad '70s television and no formal education past grammar school, this book reads like a conservative’s dream litany of what went awry with the parenting skills of the me-generation.

Burroughs’ mother, a sometime poet and most-of-the-time psychotic who loved to indulge in the regular destruction of her heirloom china collection when in the midst of a break, is depicted as a textbook narcissist. Burroughs' adopted father, Dr. Finch, who keeps a “masturbatorium” for himself in a back room of his office, is shown to be a quack of immense proportions both physically and professionally. And the inhabitants of the house, a group of neurotic, unsupervised kids with the occasional patient — like a gay pedophile — in their midst, are clearly lucky to be alive. Both the lack-of-supervision and the advice and pharmacological comforts given to these kids by their parents can only be described as abuse.

For instance, when Burroughs told his mother he no longer wanted to attend school during Jr. High, she and Finch concocted a fake suicide attempt for him. A bottle of Valium plus a bottle of Jack Daniels delivered by the good Doctor landed the pre-teen in lockdown for two weeks — but did get him out of school. When Burroughs was sexually attacked by Neil Bookman, the afore-mentioned gay molester who was twenty years his senior, he was encouraged to have an affair with him. Similarly, his “sister” at the Victorian kook farm, Natalie, was persuaded, also at the age of 13, to live with a rich neighbor, also twenty years her senior, who regularly beat her when not indulging in his penchant for underage sexual hijinks.

In the end, it is the friendship Burroughs and Natalie form that saves them both from sinking into believing that Dr. Finch’s fondness for imagining he is receiving messages from God, codified in the sizes and shapes of his own excrement, is normal.

Though Burroughs’ voice is light throughout the mostly harrowing tale, the grit seeps through. Rather than feeling amused at the conculsion of Running With Scissors, as one does after reading David Sedaris’ family tales, one is left with the feeling that they could use a good, hot shower to get the roach droppings out of their hair.

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Why Lincoln Matters
Now More Than Ever
By Mario M. Cuomo
Harcourt

Thank heaven that guys like Michael Moore and Al Franken have finally brought liberal punditry down to Rush Limbaugh’s level. Now my team can finally remove that collective stick that’s been crammed up our asses for the past decade and serve up some of the same partisan-flavored shit that the Republican Party has been shoveling since they took over talk radio. It is wearying to always have to take the high road, or at least appear to. But, when you’re number two, you try harder. And when the number one news network on television is run by a cadaverous, right-wing, power-mongering zealot, then, not only do we liberals have to try harder, we have to defend every position we take, afraid we will be accused of left-wing bias.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d would forgo watching “The O.C.” next season — well, at least any episodes that feature Marissa too heavily — to meet a Democrat who was actually left wing. Okay, maybe Dennis Kuchinich is a lefty, but that’s why he never had a chance. No the Right-wingers, Conservatives or Republicans — whatever one wants to call them — have been framing the political arguments in this country for so long that anyone who is even contemplating crazy notions like national healthcare is branded “Liberal,” with a capital L, which evidently stands for loser or Communist, or both.

Nevertheless, after watching the mildly populist speechifying by the leading Democrats at their convention in Boston this summer, it is clear that there is a movement afoot to reclaim the word “Liberal.” If it worked with “Queer,” for gays, this is certain to be a snap. Still, old Dems like Mario Cuomo are still laboring under the constrictions of the past, and feel that they have to couch all their arguments against right wing policies with something seemingly legitimate.

What, I ask, could be more legitimate than Abraham Lincoln? He freed the slaves, saved the nation and then died a martyr. (It’s notable that America’s two most well spoken leaders were assassinated. But, as Jesus showed, such is the fate of those who think too deeply.) Former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, though no John Kennedy, is no rhetorical slouch either, if his book, Why Lincoln Matters Today More Than Ever, is any indication.

In it he uses the writings of President Lincoln to contrast the contemporary ideals of the Democrats and the Republicans, with the GOP coming out the loser in the comparison. Lincoln, who is claimed by both sides whenever it is expedient, is used here to great effect to illustrate that the policies of the Bush White House are miles, as well as decades, removed from the lofty ideals of the father of Bush’s party.
Cuomo asks and answers questions like, would Lincoln have championed stem cell research? Would Lincoln have started a preemptive war? Should the nation’s tax burden be placed on the middle class and not the wealthy? Unsurprisingly, Cuomo finds that the great emancipator would have answered, yes, no and no, respectively to these queries.

If one is looking for a robust historical look at America’s (arguably) greatest leader in this book, they will be sorely disappointed. If one is looking for a less snarky screed against the policies of the Bush administration than they would find in a Stupid White Men, then Cuomo’s slim volume will fit the bill nicely.

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