Butow on Karger: "A One-Note Johnny"

There was a spate of opinion pieces about Laguna’s gay community and its history last week in local press outlets.

A flurry of bizarrely synchronistic columns March 23 appeared in the Laguna Beach Independent (Michael Ray, "Musings On The Coast"), Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot (David Hansen) and even (Who'da thunk it, egad and gadzooks!) an op-ed by my own editor at Laguna Beach Patch, Rich Kane.

Popping up like springtime weeds, all at once as if choreographed, as if orchestrated and agreed upon by Mother Media, I was vexed and wondered if I was alone in my vexation.

Many unaddressed questions about the timing and across-the-aisle writing stand out in my 40-year Laguna resident brain. Michael Ray informed us that Palm Springs is the new migrating preference, THE gay Mecca place to live.

Hello? Earth (and Homer Simpson) to Michael and LBCP readers: Duh. That’s not news, and is the veritable no-brainer. I’m still confused as to what purpose was fulfilled by telling us what we’ve known for about 15-20 years.

Moving on, why the sudden surge of nostalgia and sentimentality, why the contemporaneous drive to revive, resuscitate or comment at length about “Days of Future Past” and those closely associated with them like Fred Karger?

Yes, openly lesbian editor of the LBCP Cindy Frazier has kept Fred Karger’s ridiculous, surrealistically absurd and hopeless run for the US Presidency on the op-ed front burner almost single-handedly in her coverage this past year.

The gay Republican (now THERE’S an oxymoron) has benefitted by Cindy’s biases and thinly-veiled advocate diatribes, and that her bosses at the LA Times/Tribune don’t seem to be interested in dialing her back must be motivated by wanting the appearance of community connectivity.

She’s definitely used up space that could have served a higher value for local readers. I snoozed off early on due to the repetition, the much ado about a dead-end nothing campaign. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell he could win the Presidency, and besides, he’s never even won a public election for anything, so how does that make him qualified? No, this is and was always a publicity stunt, a marketing product ploy to subsidize Karger’s travel expenses and inflate his head.

Who said irony died on 9/11? Karger, like many Republicans, is a firm believer in capitalism and trickle-down Reaganomics. The initial buzz and furor, the wave of publicity that Karger created was over the closing of the Boom Boom Room, included as part of the sale of the Coast Inn complex.

Hey Fred, wake up and smell the coffee! You live by capitalism, then you can die by it. To not rehab or reopen the site as a gay hangout was a business decision bred from venture capitalists seeking to maximize their beachside investment. Your revenue model isn’t theirs. Deal with it and stop whining. You turned a business deal into a moral confrontation, you used your own group to further your ambitions for the limelight, for national attention. And when did the gay community select you as their spokesman and sole public representative?

It’s hypocritical to have a laissez-faire commerce platform plank in your candidacy, but deny the new owners the right to pursue THEIR best fiscal interests—not yours and not the noted gay community. In fact, isn’t that “live and let live, leave alone and let do” inherent in the laissez-faire concept regarding alternative lifestyles you promote, something you embrace?

So, who is Fred Karger and why won’t he just go away? I looked at his website and found little difference between him and other neo-cons. No, the big deal seems to come down to: “Hi, I’m Fred Karger. Elect me because I’m gay.”

When I was a young teen, we’d go down to the Long Beach Nu-Pike fun zone just off Ocean Blvd. They had the usual amusement park rides, like bumper cars, the Cyclone Racer roller coaster and whatnot.

Once we coughed up the money to go into the freak show. I clearly remember the Bearded Lady. She just sat there on a chair. We couldn’t tell if the beard was real or pasted on, but nonetheless, that was all she did—sit.

Maybe no one wants to admit or discuss it, but as a gay Republican, Karger is just a political freak, an anomaly, and asking people to vote for him on that basis of gayness only diminishes what is already a demeaning venue—politics. He’s like the standing cardboard cutouts in old theater lobbies, a Hollywood set façade without depth.

Karger wants to have it both ways: He claims that he doesn’t want gays to be discriminated against, but leverages his own orientation to gather attention and money. Which I guess he then uses to finance trips all over the place, including Puerto Rico recently. Now THERE’S a successful business model, getting suckers—oops, I mean potential campaign donors—willing to throw their votes and funds away to finance a year or two of road trips around the country for him.

Al Franken used the same marketing ploy himself on Saturday Night Live in a parody of the political process, declaring the ‘80s to be The Al Franken Decade. Basically, he said: “Vote for me because I’m Al Franken, you’ll be glad you did.” It was a supplement to his 12-step graduate character Stuart Smalley, who in skits narcissistically utters platitudes to his insecure self facing a mirror: "I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And doggone it, people like me."

Karger seems to believe that because he’s gay he deserves the blanket cachet associated with it. Seldom if ever do his views or policies ever get even minor scrutiny.

In my college days after getting out of the Marines, I sang and played guitar in a few weekend warrior bands, part-time gigs that paid little. If the drummer had kept banging on only one of his drums over and over like a monkey or 2-year-old child, we would have beaten him to within an inch of unconsciousness, and then tossed him out of the gig.

Ditto for the bass or lead guitar players. Playing one note over and over in a dulling mindless drone would have cleared the room post haste. Listeners would have gone running out the doors—as should the American electorate. Stop giving this one-note Johnny, Fred Karger, your time, your attention, and your money. It’s a waste of all three.

For myself, I vow to never read another story about him and let this be my “one and done.” He’s egotistically and selfishly strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage, and it’s specious to believe that he even speaks for the gay community at large.

Exeunt stage right, Freddy—to the extreme right.