Mark Lanier for (Sophomore) Class President!

It was unfortunate, perhaps, that on the very day that the much-circulated story of the runaway Prius was being called into question, Texas Tombstone pile-driver plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Lanier was quoted in the Wall Street Journal drawing an especially apt analogy for his and perhaps countless other litigators' jockeying to be chosen as lead attorneys in the expected consolidated mass tort against Toyota. (The Wall Street Journal has some funny idea that you should pay for its content, so we can't link to Monday's story, or even cut-and-paste the relevant verbiage, and in fact will have to type-in what follows by hand.):

All the positioning has the air of a high-school election, according to several attorneys involved.

"If it's not a high-school election then it's at least like being voted most popular," said Mark Lanier, a Houston attorney whose firm has filed numerous suits against Toyota.

Mr. Lanier, who led litigation against Vioxx maker Merck & Co. ... isn't shy about his desire to play a lead role in the Toyota suits. "Pick me, pick me," he said. "Vote for me for class president."

As previously noted, Mr. Lanier already has cornered the crucial Vietnamese vote.

The Vietnamese-American and His (Or Her) Toyota: A Story of L-U-V Gone Wrong (Very Wrong)

On Monday the Houston Chronicle's Mary Flood reported on the media-abetted* client-recruitment efforts of Houston plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Lanier, who, like many members of the legal profession, is damn near salivating over the big payday he sees up around the bend in the accelerator problems afflicting Toyota products. "This is a mass tort," proclaimed Lanier, with dollar signs almost literally spinning in his eyeballs. "Toyota is in for billions of dollars and a number of years."

Lanier's non-corporeal presence has always left an oleaginous smudge, at least in our eyes, similar to the one we always detected after viewings of the now-disgraced boy evangelist, that phony hambone populist with the $400 haircut who once actually made us feel sympathetic toward Dick Cheney.** The nature of the Lanier enterprise was summed up, perhaps unconsciously but most likely not, by the Chronicle scribe's use of such skepticism-tinged phraseology as "called a press conference largely to mark his legal turf" (like a peein' hound dog--get it?) and "lawyers in Texas and around the country have smelled Toyota's corporate blood in the water and mustered" (like certain sea creatures whose teeth are pearly white--check it out!).

Although we are a founding member of the Weekley YMCA in southwest Houston, our purpose here today is not to prattle on about product liability, mass torts, smilin' plaintiffs' lawyers with expensive hair-dos, negligent corporate entities or the whole host of phenomena that surely will attend the upcoming legal disemboweling of the Toyota Corp. (which can only be good for the American auto industry, right?). No, what caught our eye in Flood's story was the following:

Lanier, a nationally known plaintiff's lawyer, stood on the courthouse steps with lawyer Tammy Tran, who supplied 300 possible cases from the local Vietnamese community.

Though they had boxes of files and Lainer's firm is one of those with priority advertising on Google, Lanier and Tran have filed only one lawsuit against Toyota so far over unspecified injuries by an undergraduate student whose Camry hit a parked car.

Three hundred possible cases from the local Vietnamese community? Dang, we're thinking, does every Vietnamese in Houston drive a Toyota (with or without a malfunctioning accelerator )? Well, apparently so,*** at least according to this report by Fox 26's Isiah Carey, who relates that the afore-mentioned Tran told him:

"When Vietnamese come to America there's three things they want: No. 1, a good job; No. 2, a house, and No. 3, a Toyota ... and they're very disappointed in the automaker."

Ms. Tran added:

"Each Vietnamese family owns two Toyota [sic]. Toyota is the dream of every Vietnamese."

(Carey reported that the driver of the afore-mentioned Camry is "in medical school" and was "seriously injured" and that her family is "the first of at least 300 Vietnamese families in Houston to file a lawsuit against Toyota, claiming acceleration problems." As a news consumer you sorta wish the media could get their story lines straight.)

It's stories like these that make us think back, fondly, on our late father, the obstinate son of an immigrant who after World War II resolutely refused to buy any product––car, radio, lawn mower, etc.––made in either Germany or Japan,*** not only because he had spent four or five months in continental Europe getting his ass shot at by Nazis on a semi-regular basis but also because so many of his college classmates (A&M, '41) fell and never got up at the hands of Hitler's and Tojo's minions, apparently to ensure that future generations of Vietnamese-Americans could fulfill their American dream by stocking up on Japanese-made automobiles. (You're in America now, so buy American, por favor.)

By the way, we noticed on her Web site that the afore-mentioned lawyer Tran is, like her litigation lord and overseer Lanier, a big-time Bible thumper ("Leading with Faith, Winning with Experience"). When we lay us down to sleep this evening we will ask our Lord Jesus to please shield us, not only from defective accelerators in Japanese-made automobiles but from smug, sanctimonious Bible thumpers, and Koran thumpers, too––especially smug, sanctimonious Bible thumpers, or Koran thumpers, with Bar cards.

*But as Tony Soprano often shrugged, "What are ya gonna do?"

**By the way, did you see that the National Enquirer is being considered for a Pulitzer for its eviscerating of the boy evangelist? Yeah--and it deserves the prize as a frontal rebuke to the prissy Mainstream News and Infotainment Media (M-NIM).

***Come to think of it, though, we know at least a few Vietnamese who do not drive Toyotas but instead chug around town in Hondas––perhaps we just know the wrong sort of Vietnamese.

****We, of course, are made of flimsier stuff and once owned a Volkswagen, although we have since stuck with American-made vehicles.

Beaumont: What Houston Should Aspire to Be

It may be some years before Beaumont elects a gay mayor. And while residents there can rightly take pride in the Babe Didrikson Zaharias* Park, they have no poopy-precious downtown development tool such as Discovery Green of which to boast. There appears to be but one standalone Starbucks in the entirety of Beaumont, and the city’s nightlife opportunities have been much diminished since the Red Carpet Inn burned down many years ago. Yet there is one place where Beaumont has it all over Houston. According to what is no doubt the handiwork of some internationally recognized advertising and marketing genius, Beaumont has the cleanest restrooms in Texas. That, anyway, is what a billboard somewhere west of Beaumont proclaims.

It is possible that this message has been greeting visitors for many months, if not years, and we had previously missed it. We usually keep our eyes on the road and our hands upon the wheel, but last week we were riding shotgun and happened to be wide awake as our jolly caravan approached Jefferson County. We were just sorry that we had no pressing need to avail our self of a public toilet at that particular point in our journey.

Our personal knowledge of Beaumont’s public facilities is scant and much dated––we’re better acquainted with those in Vidor––yet we have no reason at all to disbelieve the town’s haughty claim to superiority. It was, after all, on a billboard.

We ask: Can Houston offer the same assurances to the road-weary traveler?

*A real person of notable accomplishment––if you can't identify her and at least two of the sports at which she excelled, please pack your things and go back to whereever it is you came from ASAP.

Hidden Houston: A City With A Long, Proud Though Heretofore Undocumented History of Electing Gay Mayors

Slampo’s Place interrupts its ongoing Al Hoang coverage to bring you this exclusive interview with Hampton Hardish, adjunct professor of history at South Dairy Ashford Community College and author of the possibly soon-to-be-published Houston: City of Gay Mayors. “We” in Houston have been convulsed in an orgy of self-congratulation in the past week over the election of a lesbian as mayor––a historic development that has proved, beyond a doubt, that Houston is not the dusty cow-town full of yahoos they still believe us to be In New York City and Paris, France but rather the cosmopolitan, urbane and broad-minded place “we” have always known it to be. Hardish, however, claims that Annise Parker won’t be Houston’s first gay mayor, and that in fact the city has had many gay mayors, going back many years. Slampo’s Place under-assistant managing editor and executive vice-president Hidalgo Hidalgo caught up with Hardish yesterday for an interview that began at the Starbucks on Wilcrest and Highway 59 and concluded many hours later at a southwest Houston sports bar. Sr. Hidalgo asked only that we confirm, for the record, that he himself is not gay. “That would not be so good in my community,” he explained.

HH: So, man, you claiming that this Parker lady ain’t gonna be the first gay person to be mayor of this city. Is that right?

HH: Yes sir, that is correct.

HH: So who was the first gay mayor here?

HH: Actually, it all started with with Houston’s first mayor, James Sanders Holman. Back then “gay” simply meant “light-hearted or happy,” and the clinical term “homosexual” had not been coined. Most did not think of themselves as having one “sexual orientation” or the other but kind of played it as it laid. Many were straight, many were gay, some swung both ways. The bayou ran slow and lazy, the fish and wildlife were abundant.

HH. Nah, man. Go on, get outa here.

HH: It's true ... One of my graduate research assistants unearthed the diary of a French visitor to Houston in 1837 who wrote: “One of the charms of this fetid, mosquito-infested hellhole (perhaps the only charm) is seeing the mayor strolling the streets arm-in-arm with a strapping young rustic whom he calls ‘Carl,’ and whose wispy beard he gently strokes as the two wade through the thick chimney smoke and ankle-deep mud.”

HH: The fu....

HH: Yes, there it is.

HH: Okay, what about this guy, whatshisname, Oscar Holcombe?

HH: Not only was he Houston’s longest-serving mayor but Houston’s longest-serving gay mayor. He wasn’t called “the Old Gray Fox” because of his cunning and political acumen, but rather because he was considered, well, foxy. Back then, the city had only a couple off off-the-beaten-track “nelly” bars, and OGF, as he was known, frequented both of them.

HH: Aww, man––how you know that?

HH: I have it on good authority from Ray Hill, who as you know is either the MLK or the Robin Hood of the local gay-rights movement, and has been the mentor to any gay person of accomplishment in Houston for the past 35 years.

HH: So, he knew this Holcombe dude?

HH: Perhaps not. But he says he knows that Jesse Jones and others were uneasy about what they called the mayor’s “misadventures,” although Holcombe always made time for his “boys,” especially around the holidays.

HH: No way! What about your more modern mayors?

HH: Well, Kathy Whitmire was caught in a hot tub with Lily Tomilin ....

HH: Whoa––I thought that was that Ann Richards lady ....

HH: Well, possibly, her too. But Whitmire was unmarried, a widow. Draw your own conclusion.

HH: Who else?

HH: Well, Fred Hofheinz liked to dress in women’s clothes, and Jim MConn was known to “shake his bottom down to the ground” after-hours at many of the city’s gay disco clubs of the late‘70s and early ‘80s. Lee Brown, historians have now determined, was the model for the cop in the Village People ... and, oh yes, when Louie Welch suggested that we “shoot the queers,” this was well-understood in the gay community as meaning, “I’ll be down at the corner of Westheimer and Taft around 11:30 tonight, and I'll be needing a ride.” After his death, it was discovered that he had amassed a large, secret collection of antique patterned draperies.

HH: Aw, man. Next thing you’re gonna tell me is Bob Lanier was gay!

HH: Yes, that appears to be the case.

HH: Naw, man, he was a hoss! You ever check out his wife, that Elsie lady?

HH: I know this will be hard for many people to accept.

HH: Okay, professor, tell me: Has Houston ever had a mayor who wasn’t gay?

HH: Well, of course, Bill White is not gay,* and next year he has a good shot at becoming Texas’ first non-gay governor since Sam Houston.

HH: Beauford Jester was gay, too? Man, all this politics talk is makin’ my head hurt. You got any money?

HH: Some, yes.

HH: I know this bar, Bongo’s, we can get some beers, 2-for-1 at happy hour. Watch the fútbol.

HH: Yes, I’d like that. I enjoy experiencing other cultures.

HH: Uh, yeah. Listen, just don’t mention it to anybody there that you’re gay, okay?

HH: But I’m not gay.

HH: Yeah, whatevs. Gimme your keys. I’m drivin’.

*In the interest of disclosure, Prof. Hardish notes that his wife, two of his three children, his mother-in-law, a second cousin, and an “elderly aunt” all work for White in some capacity.