In Which All of Lost Is Local

You Had Me Several Years Ago When I Was Still Quite Naive

by DICK CHENEY

In political life, it's always more fun to characterize yourself as the opposition, unless you're Rahm Emanuel and you do most of your work in showers. Of course this is only one of the trillion political maxims that exist, most of which Tom Delay whiplashes on the backs of his slaves. Why is politics full of clichés? Mainly because the people involved in it are also clichés.

don't trust anyone shorter than 5'0"
Liberal imaginings of government's highest office are always patently off base. I keep waiting for Robert Reich's lame memoir to be adapted into a feature starring Peter Dinklage. Ivan Reitman's Dave turned the presidency into a joke, The American President was basically about the commander-in-chief having an online dating presence, which was totally inappropropriate. (It is also unknown why he listed 'ginger hair, cropped short' on his list of preferences.)

stay out of the oval office lebowski Despite the fact that the First Lady had perished in office, it is proper to wait at least until you're reelected or propositioned by Joslyn James. I can't even imagine how Laura Bush dying and George W. Bush roadraging Rachel Uchitel and Helen Mirren would have gone over with the general public, although considering our popularity at the end, it might have been an option worth trying.

The West Wing was supposed to be a snappy and exciting drama; instead it turned into a depressing soap that paralled its creator's decline into paranoia and psychosis. Its target audience was composed of sideburned chaps who think short novels reimagining FDR's arrival at Malta are fun for weekend reading. By the time The West Wing was over, most of the liberal enthusiasm and idealism was confined to California, where it raised the marginal tax rate and bankrupted the state.

Only the most naïve and silly people in our culture think politics are important, but if Glenn Greenwald and Alex Pareene didn't exist to parrot liberal dogma, actual parrots would have to work for a living. I can think of no better way to hammer this point home than by explaining that I was freely elected the vice president of the United States. Me.

Have you already perceived where I am going with this line of air-tight reasoning? Because I had to explain to both my wife and my concubine that last night's Evangeline Lilly flashback was from eight years ago, and the only people who look as good as they did ten years ago are Vladimir Putin and Jenna Fischer above the waist. To take Lost seriously is making a great error. This once-great show prefers to be a parody of itself.

hate u guys

If I ever came face to face with Carlton Cuse, I'd cut him. If I ever saw Damon Lindelof, I'd french kiss his wife for the eight years that her husband stole from me. Last week's shocking main character death quadrilogy rivaled the end of Mr. Eko for sheer stupidity. If you weren't going to do anything with these characters after six seasons, at least give us a decapitation or two. I want to see Lapidus' head on a platter.

This week's lazy storytelling exercise reimagined the parable of Jacob and Esau, or something. I was never really too hot on the Bible, or the Cider House Rules, or any proscribed behavior other than horseback riding. Several conclusions can be drawn from this exercise, and since I am so filled with rage, I can barely compose paragraphs:

The Mother, in the same fashion as Esau did afterwards, was able to reconstitute herself in smoke. How else could she have filled the hole above the Orchid station and murdered all of Esau's friends?

'was josiah bartlett as kewl as he seems IRL?' Perhaps she even assumed the form of Jacob and Esau's real mother, Claudia, to Esau. She also might have been one (or all) of men Jacob and Esau observed in the woods.

When confronted with the truth, she did not deny this to her sons, and they both made their own decisions.

It is reasonable to assume, as the Mother says at one point, that there really were no other people on the island than the three of them.

'jacob, why did the character of Walt exist?'
Jacob and Esau can't kill one another. If you kill a god by stabbing it in the heart before it speaks to you, it dies. Going for the post-mortem reacharound is largely frowned upon.

If you take the life of a producer of Lost in this fashion, the rewards may be some kind of production deal or a chance to ghostwrite the next Mission: Impossible.

Young boys on the island bear a striking resemblance to a certain teenage pop star, while men unconsciously imitate a drunk Fred Armisen.

from this day forward you will be known as Justin Bieber People who pretend to be too holier-than-thou to watch all of Lost are probably incredibly self-involved to begin with.

If you're eating a bunch of chicken surrounded by lettuce, don't call it a salad.

Sometimes at night I think about Fred Armisen having sex with Peggy from Mad Men and I sob.

come on peggy, he's old enough to be your advertising mentor/father figure Wasn't the answer to Lost just Dust from The Golden Compass? Not coincidentally I hate The Golden Compass and Philip Pullman seems like a real asshole, like the kind of person who always come up to you at the senior center and wants to pick your brain about some grey spot on his balls.

this was the answer to Lost. take a good look. The smoke monster's master plan to kill the castaways involved going to the Ajira plane Widmore had rigged with explosives, stealing those explosives, goading everyone into taking the submarine, and hoping it all worked out. Genius! Why didn't Allison Janney think of doing this to her kids?

Now with only three and half hours remaining on Lost's ticking clock, what can we really expect? This episode's flashback to the show's magical first season was an attempt to prove that Lost's writers knew what they were doing all along. We know this isn't true because most of the show's writers work for V and Flashforward now.

Hitchcock, as we all know, explained that the MacGuffin described what was in the briefcase, which we could never see. As he famously put it to Truffaut:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh that's a MacGuffin."

The first one asks "What's a MacGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers "Well, then that's no MacGuffin!" So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.

When we were introduced to the idea of Jacob, he seemed salty and mysterious, like dating Russell Brand. Now it turns out he's just a guy who liked to beat the shit out of his younger brother while Josiah Bartlett's press secretary looks on approvingly. There are no fucking lions in the Scottish highlands.

What was so great about Lost was the feeling of discovery, that another 'what if' lay around the corner. We don't want answers to our questions; we never really want to know what's in the briefcase. Who cares what's in there? If you know that it's a bunch of diamonds, does it make Pulp Fiction any better? Is The Golden Compass less tedious if you believe the reason magic exists in the world is because of something definable and concrete?

Cursed by the notion that they needed to 'resolve' all of the questions the show has posed, Cuse and Lindelof wandered away from the central point. The answer to your question might make you feel better, but it also might lead you to a much less entertaining question.

We care about the characters of Lost in the present, not in the past. Despite the fact that the lives of Jack, Kate, Hurley, Jin, Sun, Michael, and Henry Gale are meaningless constructs, we want to believe that their purpose, and the purpose of the entire show, was greater than the sum of meaningless parts. We don't care about where we come from so much as where we're going.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his past reviews of Lost here.

"Legend In Your Own Time" - Carly Simon (mp3)

"Mockingbird" - Carly Simon (mp3)

"Why" - Carly Simon (mp3)

"The Right Thing To Do" - Carly Simon (mp3)

In Which Lost Starts A Race War In Its Season Premiere

White Paradise

by DICK CHENEY

Lost

Season Six

Kaltxì. Ngaru lu fpom srak. Fì-skxawng-ìri tsap’alute sengi oe. Tsun oe nga-hu nì-Na’vi pängkxo a fì-’u oe-ru prrte’ lu.

What's that? You haven't taken the Introduction to Na'vi course I've been offering at the Learning Annex since Jesus's birthday came and went? No matter, as soon children will be communicating entirely in Na'vi, a language that has no word for pedophile, champion, and, strangely, sandwich.

let me help you dig her grave - we can make a kissing game out of it With Lost back on the airwaves, I am back on This Recording with a contract that permits me to make fun of Lambert for being a ginger as often as I like. Since my thoughts about how revolting I find Evangeline Lilly haven't graced these pages in awhile, much has changed. My Obama jokes are no longer as amusing since our country Chinua Achebed all over my pantaloons. This is a time for all Americans to live together or die alone like Shepard Smith or Jennifer Garner in Valentine's Day.

In response to the revolutionary debut of Avatar, two serious changes have come about in my post-vice-presidential life. First, my dietician now knows exactly what I'm talking about when I tell him I want Sam Worthington's body. Second, the white majority that produces Lost is finally realizing that it's OK to be racist. Racism is the only thing that can save us from four more years of BO apologizing for the billions he gave to banks during his State of the Union.

Outward racism is all the rage these days. Vanity Fair highlighted the most promising eating disorders in Hollywood and they didn't even tab the girl from Precious. On a scale of one-to-ten how surprised would you be if you found out Graydon Carter owned slaves?

what's the na'vi word for three-way? Lost has taken up the James Cameron-related charge to make fools of people of color with the most naïve aplomb since Joss Whedon told Fox execs that everyone would enjoy Dollhouse. Last night's two hour long Lost premiere began with Jack on a plane, condescendingly observing the show's only interracial couple, regaling them with smiles and plaudits alike. He was about five seconds away from handing Rose and Bernard a nickel - Everything That Rises Must Converge-style.

From there we went back to the island. Somehow detonating a hydrogen bomb didn't fix everyone's problems, although it did work wonders as a time travel device, taking the cast from 1977 to 2010 with everyone alive and Kate somehow in a tree. In the ensuing fracas, Sawyer blood-kissed Juliet and it was astonishingly only the third most awkward kiss of 2010 after Margene and Benny Hendrickson's Big Love smooch and Jenna Elfman kissing anyone.

"let's watch keeping the faith on DVD and observe how hot I was before scientology!"Hugo Reyes, the show's only surviving Latino character, is continually depicted as a slow-witted consumer of chicken who despite great verbal faculty in some areas, reverts to "dudes" and "come on" faster than B.J. Novak tricks girls. Don't get me started on the show's Asian characters. I'm not exactly well-educated enough to completely explain why depicting a Korean man as a glorified thug and an Asian-American as a medium is more objectionable than giving the native population on Pandora dreads for hair, but it just feels wrong.

why didn't I think of sending messages like this? how the f do you subpoena an ankh?Now that we know the man in black is in fact the smoke monster, his battle with Jacob is starting to more closely resemble a race war than a feud between two gods. AWB (Acting While Black) on Lost is considered a faux pas at best. When I was in Cali for the Chargers game a few weeks ago I saw the character formerly known as Walt at a tumblr meet up. It was so depressing I wanted to fly him to Waikiki and play chess with him for hours.

This wasn't the only thing that felt a little awry last night. The dramatic opening pan through miles of underwater CGI looked awful, and the rest of the two hour episode was shot on about three sets. Lost is starting to resemble the output of a very serious improv troupe with the director calling from offstage, "OK, Evangeline, in this scene Kate wants to run. Do you copy? She is going to run from her problems instead of dealing with them. Do you need a second with that?"

"lefleuer, your dick is about .038 oden. you're welcome"In many ways, this interminable premiere was a just a tying up of loose ends. Now that Elizabeth Mitchell has a new acting job staring at CGI spaceships (ABC tried to Avatar-up V with little success), she doesn't need to make vague and unhelpful suggestions about LeFleur harboring long lost feelings for Kate. She was a broken record with that stuff. If television has taught us anything, it's that the timely death of a lover opens up a multitude of romantic possibilities. At the very least, John Edwards has this to look forward to.

the long con beginsJosh Holloway looks like he's been chasing ass in L.A. since last season ended, and his obsession with Jack was never the show's most successful storyline. Jack isn't all that sympathetic, and Sawyer is about as appealing as a widower with blood all over his face can be. Jack's arrogant dismissal of Locke's paralysis was typical for doctors. They always think they're the best at everything. It's so predictable. Now that Sawyer is about as compelling as a Cabbage patch kid, this show needs a protagonist, stat.

if there is any one thing this show needs, it is ian mcshane Of course the most annoying moment of the premiere was when every d-bag in the world whispered to his friends, "That guy was on Deadwood!" when John Hawkes showed up to interpret the vague directions of the Asian warlord Other who controls the fountain of the youth. Jesus guys, even Ponce de Leon thinks that's a bunch of racist crap. James Cameron is cringing, and he invented racism.

"at least I'll be able to find acting work after this show ends"Also put out to pasture for most of the episode was Sayid. Despite the weird moment where he told everyone to get out of the way as he kicked down the bathroom door of Oceanic Flight 815 to save Driveshaft and Jack and the crew looked at him like he had a box-cutter, Sayid is the only minority with a slightly positive portrayal. Actually they've been portraying him as a vicious murderer and torturer for the last five seasons, so I take that back.

Reinventing yourself is a subject near and dear to my heart. Y'all knew me as a boisterous, controlling, megalomaniacal vice president who loved e-mail, gchat, and Lost spoilers. In my new life, I spend most of the day pounding Buffalo Trace and snacking on chimichangas. Lost may be insane and contradictory, but above all it is familiar. You always know where you stand with respect to Lost, which is more than I can say for my wife Lynne.

OK see you next week. I will spend every day between now and next Tuesday trying to believably photoshop myself onto Greg Oden's body.

Dick Cheney is the former vice president of the United States and the senior contributor to This Recording.

did our penises just touch