Tag Archives: Electoral POTUS

12.16.18
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Addiction Du Jour

So I’m sitting here listening to Jada Pinkett Smith talk about addiction because what else would you do on a Saturday afternoon when deadlines are looming and you have a dozen and half more student scripts to read?

Killin’ it

You might want to know that it turns out Jada has a talk show on Facebook Watch (Note:  So this is a thing now?) called Red Table Talk with her Mom (Adrienne) and daughter (Willow) and the random guest where they share three generational perspectives on…issues.

Now I’m not a Jada fan, or even non-fan, though I remain rankled by her husband Will Smith refusing to kiss a guy onscreen decades ago when he played a gay character in the film adaptation of Six Degrees of Separation.

Never has there been a more appropriate usage of this gif #ByeWill

Still, that’s not her responsibility and I did enjoy her in Bamboozled.  Though I really dislike the idea of people home schooling their kids, which apparently the Smiths have done.  And I think we can all also agree her announced Oscar boycott a couple of years ago, partly due to Will not being nominated for, ahem, Concussion, was a bit grand and a bit much.

On the other hand, who’s to say?  #OscarsSoWhite became more of a thing and the next year Moonlight did win best picture.

All of this is #SoNotMyBusiness, of course.

I don’t know these people and have no right to judge them.  Except, well, I do – most of us do – especially when they expose their personal lives to us via…well, I was going to say television.  But silly me, Red Table Talk is a web series, which is not exactly TV even though it involves a small screen with talking heads and programming you can make disappear with the flick of your finger.

TV? Phone? Remote? I have no idea.

Don’t knock that power.  How much did you wish you could make disappear this week?

Somehow watching Jada’s Mom talk about her years as a heroin addict, Will’s sister admitting up until a week ago she was stoned on grass 24/7 and Jada recalling her own sex addiction back in her twenties became, in itself, addicting.  At least for the 15 plus minutes it was on.  Add to this the presence August Alsina, the seemingly tough guy young singer she and Mom recently helped out of pill addiction and I began to wonder if my continued interest wasn’t the latent addiction gene that I know I carry but had always managed to keep at bay, finally rearing its ugly head.

Suffice it to say – no.

We’re all addicted to addiction and not necessarily in a good way.

Pretty much

Although…I lament on how unable I am on most days to turn off cable news.   And when I had my students watch Boogie Nights last month I could see the look of sheer terror in some of their eyes when I casually mentioned that porn was not always free to watch over and over again on the Internet.  Speaking of which, is Twitter raging an addiction?

That’s obviously rhetorical.

Three major movies at the moment spotlight addiction.  Julia Roberts tries valiantly to keep her son from going back on drugs in Ben is Back, Steve Carrell valiantly trying to understand why his son does drugs in Beautiful Boy and Lady Gaga is torn up inside and out that the man she loves and knew was an addict before she married him is now back on drugs in A Star Is Born.

I was so moved by this scene I almost forgot the terrible orange hair moment. #ALLY

The old sick joke at the newspaper I once worked at was that it took at least three concurrent examples to even begin to consider something a trend at any moment in time.  So if we add Twitter raging to the mix, well…. draw your own conclusion.  But know another golden journalism rule I learned in grad school at Northwestern — never rule out the obvious.

(Note: You’re welcome since I just provided you with several thousands of dollars of valuable education gratis).

The price is right

In too many ways all three of these film stories are rather obvious, but, isn’t that part of the attraction?  We know these people, we’ve seen these people or perhaps we are these people.  All of us addicts.  Or enablers.  And sometimes both.

Tom Arnold just claimed in Newsweek that even self-proclaimed never tasted alcohol Electoral College POTUS Trump habitually snorted Adderall on the set of NBC’s The Apprentice.  Stand up comic Noel Casler, who says he worked on the show for six years called the EC POTUS a speed freak and said his obsession/ogling of the female contestants on the Miss Teen Universe pageant he owned was something akin to what would happen if you gave Jeffrey Dahmer a cooking show. 

It’s just beyond #MUELLERHURRY

None of this is pretty but we don’t live in pretty times.  Therefore, the more we can understand our addictions and/or the addicts we love, or love to hate, the sooner we can make the necessary informed choices.

They may not all be our cups of tea but let’s not pretend A Star is Born, Ben is Back and Beautiful Boy don’t offer us all something and that together they’re not a trend. We can even learn from Jada Pinkett Smith, god help us.

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts – “I Hate Myself For Loving You”

 

11.11.18
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Hold On

Hollywood, CA – Nov. 10, 2018:

Yes, the Malibu fires ARE that bad.  Put it this way, I live in the hills of Hollywood – way, way, waaaay on the other side of town from the beach – and I can smell the smoke INSIDE my house.

Boo hoo, hoo, says our Electoral College POTUS.

This is me restrained… VERY restrained #srsly #heistheWORST

That threat came hours after the fire became unsustainable, destroying at last count 70,000 acres of land and 67,000 structures as it killed 11 people (note: now 25) not lucky enough to be among the 250,000 evacuated from their homes.

Oh, and as of this writing, that fire is still only 20% contained.

California beach community Congressman Ted Lieu quickly responded to the person we Californians now at best refer to as the vile sociopath.

You know.. just the basics about the government YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF

Okay, fine, perhaps the vile sociopath phrase is mine.  But at the moment it’s safe to say I speak for the majority of the state.  And then some.

Sensing he was in the crosshairs as he jetted to Paris, where he decided to skip the ceremony he came for that honored military sacrifices in WWI, the VS (Note: Or  someone) tweeted this 15 hours later:

Of course, that’s how it goes with VSes (Note:  All right, my phrase, but feel free to appropriate).  The only thing greater than the lie is the non-apology fix soon afterwards when they fear they’ve been caught showing their true selves.

Yet I, for one, am hopeful.  There are almost three dozen new women coming to our rescue on Capitol Hill by way of the 2019 Congress, the overwhelming number of whom are Democrats fed up with the VS’s insults and illogic.  It should be noted that’s A LOT more than the mere 24 who came to town in 1992, which was dubbed The Year of the Woman.

Having been raised essentially by strong women this remains unsurprising to me.  The gals/ladies/females/smarter sex are used to cleaning up the messes that we boys make and they do it quite effectively.

Here she comes #WATCHOUTBOYS

I was going to write they occasionally even do it dancing backwards in heels in reference to the old Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire trope, but even in jest that felt pejorative.  Especially since among these women are a CIA agent, a nuclear engineer and a nurse.  Not that they don’t dance or wear high heels, but still…

Of course, my favorite is Kansas’s Sharice Davids, a Native American lesbian who is also a mixed martial arts champ.  She’s someone who can literally kick some ass, and hopefully she’ll do it in heels.

BADASS

Meanwhile, it is also worth noting that at last count a whopping 58% of the candidates Barack Obama endorsed WON on Election Day vs. 28% of the ones our VS-in-chief spoke up for.  And that is before the two recounts in Florida for senator AND governor, as well as the potential runoff for the governorship in Georgia.

While we’re noting, let’s also remind ourselves that the Democratic challenger for governor in Florida, Andrew Gillum, is Black, as is Georgia’s potential governor, Stacey Abrams.  Let’s also be aware that both state’s elections have been rife with accusations of voter suppression, voter roll purging and just failure to count all of the ballots in heavily Democratic and/or Black neighborhoods.

Here’s a photo of a box of provisional ballots left in the closet of an elementary school in Florida’s heavily Democratic Broward County.  It was found there by an elementary school teacher two days after Election Day.  And yes, the teacher was female.

Oh hello there. #isthisreallife #TVepisodeplot

You might remember Broward County as the scene of many election debacles in decades past #BushVGore.  MSNBC’s Joy Reid, a former 14 year Florida resident, says one reason is that Broward is heavily Dem, and in a fairly Republican state like Florida it gets the dregs of voting attention by the electoral powers-that-be.

On the other hand, people do make mistakes.

The 2016 election was one of those.   And then some.

Melissa Etheridge – “Hold On, I’m Coming”