Got Beef?

I was going to weigh in this week on Tucker Carlson being fired by Fox but the thought of writing about him made me nauseous.

More nauseating was that Tucker was the highest rated host on cable news (Note: By a lot), probably in great part for spewing a lot of American nativist rhetoric with racist, sexist and anti-Semitic dog whistles.

Yeah, when you resist calling someone a racist, sexist Jew hater outright you couch it with phrases like dog whistles so you don’t sound overly vitriolic and hysterical from the get-go. But I’m not even sure there’s much value to that these days.

I just finished watching Netflix’s original, mesmerizing and often confounding limited series Beef. It stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two people involved in what can kindly be called a road rage incident that escalates into a full out war to their metaphorical deaths.

Like their episode one characters, I used to flip off people in my car for doing something I saw as particularly egregious like cutting me off or driving too fast or too slow.

As most people who live in Los Angeles do at least two, or three, or four hundred times during their lives.

But I don’t do it anymore because I’ve learned to prioritize and have had years of therapy.

Still that doesn’t work for everyone.

As Mr. Yeun cautions Ms. Wong in one of the best lines in the series:

Western therapy doesn’t work on eastern minds.

Good as that observation is in the context of those characters, I’m wondering whether insight and appropriately channeled anger is all that it’s cracked up to be for any one of us in 2023.

I mean, giving someone the finger is certainly a healthier reaction than, say, shooting them in the head.

It also beats disowning a relative simply because you disagree with their politics. It even trumps (Note: Sorry) living each day waiting for the next misogynist, bigoted or privilege-enabled remark someone makes just so you can toss out your very well rehearsed retort back to silence them.

Flipping someone off the old-fashioned way is just so… clean.

Like a succinct stroll down memory lane of the way things used to be. If only it didn’t lead to the kind of inevitable destruction and death the way it sometimes does in Beef, and now too frequently happens in real life, I’d do it all day.

And night.

Here’s just a brief list of things and circumstances that would get my middle finger this week:

1 – Montana Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe sponsored a bill in the state to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors, even with parental approval. And in a speech she made on the floor of the legislature she went viral for saying she’d rather risk her daughter dying of suicide than allow her to transition.

She backed this up by proclaiming her own daughter was, in fact, suicidal for three years. And when someone once asked her if she wouldn’t do anything to help save her, Rep. KSC’s response, after some thought, was a firm:

No…I was not going to give in to her emotional manipulation…I was not going to let her tear apart my family and I was not going to let her tear me apart…

Really? Well, here’s my f-n middle finger Kerri. Choke on it. And if your daughter happens to read this she can feel free to shoot me an email. She might not be trans, you don’t ever quite say, but quite clearly she’s depressed and needs to be around someone who will not only listen but also hear what’s on her mind. #BiteMe #MissHannigan #YoureAStoneColdWtch

2- During a Congressional hearing on school closures during COVID, US Congresswoman and national embarrassment Marjorie Taylor-Greene (GA-R) this week asked Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a married out lesbian, if she was a mother.

When Ms. Weingarten answered that she was a mother by marriage, aka a stepmother, large Marge called her out by declaring she was not a biological mother. She later went on to emphasize: The problem is, people like you need to admit… you’re a political activist, not a teacher, not a mother, and not a….

Well, you get the picture….of me sticking my middle finger in her eye and up her…

And that would cheer my late and fabulous stepmother Shelly, who I think about daily, to no end. And I can also guarantee that if my biological mother Marion were still alive to hear this she would literally say Marjorie Taylor-Greene can go f-ck herself! Just who in the hell does she think she is, anyway??

3- At his civil rape trial this week, Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina grilled writer E. Jean Carroll on the validity of the events that led her to file a suit against his client decades later for assaulting and raping her in a Bergdof Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s.

At one point in his cross-examination, Tacopina blithely used the word supposedly when referring to Ms. Carroll’s accusation.

Not supposedly. I was raped, she retorted.

That’s your version, Ms. Carroll. That you were raped, Tacopina countered.

Those are the facts, she insisted.

It then escalated when he pressed her on why she didn’t scream.

I’m not a screamer…I was fighting. You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.

Denying her was beating up on her, Tacopina continued on with that style of questioning, but Ms. Carroll was not having any of it, noting that women often stay silent about attacks for years because they’re afraid of being questioned on why they didn’t physically do more to stop it.

They are always asked, why didn’t you scream?… I’m telling you he raped me, whether I screamed or not…

Clearly, Ms. Carroll doesn’t need me, or any man, to defend her from questioning by an attorney that seems like a bit player who never made it on camera during all six seasons of The Sopranos.

Nevertheless, I will.

Hey Joe — This is why you are in the minority and the reason why most people under 40 are merely waiting for you and your kind to die off and go away so this can be a better world. My only regret is I will likely not live long enough to dance on all of your graves. In the meantime, here’s an Instagram photo of the biggest digit in my right hand to put under your pillow. #DouchyMcDouche

4 –Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, an announced 2024 Republican presidential candidate who is polling at barely 6%, far behind Trump and DeSantis and not even close enough to surpass Mike Pence, decided to weigh on in on, of all things, the subject of AGE a few days ago in a Hail Mary attempt to get into the news cycle.

So desperate is she for attention that after Pres. Biden this week announced his reelection campaign, Ms. Haley warned on Fox News that he wouldn’t make it to the end of a second term.

…I think we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely.

Nice.

And so good to know she’s got a bead on these things.

Not that it matters but…Biden’s Mom lived to be 92 and ½ and his Dad made it to 87. And they died a full one and two decades ago, respectively. Which means that given the president’s genes, access to top quality health care and the advances in medical science, he could easily live to be…100.

He will outlive us all just to spite you

Suck on my middle finger, Nikki, until you can figure out some other strategy to lift yourself up from the hellscape that your life has become. You also might rethink tossing a Molotov cocktail across the bow at Kamala. In the minds of many in your party, you two have A LOT MORE in common than you might think. #ThinkAboutIt

5- And speaking of middle fingers, what about….Succession?? I, for one, was thrilled when the old fart dropped dead. F-CK ‘EM! ALL of them. And randy Cousin Greg, too.

Because do you really care at this point what happens to the fictionalized HBO version of Fox News when we get to see the real one, and its family, slowly imploding before our eyes, in the actual news cycle, each week?

I’ll raise BOTH my middle fingers to that. And all of yours, if I could.

Charlie Day – “Go F*ck Yourselves”

06.20.21

by notesfromachair

Three Holidays

There are no less than THREE holidays in Los Angeles this weekend, and that doesn’t include the celebration of the lifting of masks for the vaccinated or the opening up of tens of thousands of businesses nationwide.

Not that I’m rushing to take off my mask if you’re standing next to me or jonesing to get back to a packed gym or movie theatre.

For one thing, I can jog around the hills of my neighborhood and have weights at home. And secondly, what movie am I going to go out and risk my life to see?

Peter Rabbit 2? A Quiet Place 2? Fast and Furious 9?

Yes, 9!!! Or as it’s better known, F9.

To which I say to the studios – f U.

But let’s not go there, even though I went there, in this celebratory time.

And yes, OF COURSE, I’m exaggerating.

I’ve been vaccinated and so have almost 70% (oh wait, that’s 60% receiving at least one dose) of California. So truly, I’m not risking MY life by going out to a movie theatre and sitting or standing next to you – Delta Variant – at least according to medical science.

Right?

Exactly.

But if life is at all worth living for any reason it is for these times of celebration. And, I’ll admit it, I like a party.

But am I the only one trying to balance the demands of Father’s Day, Gay Pride and now Juneteenth, all in the space of a single long weekend?

It feels strange. Even for a fella who has lived more than half his life in L.A., headquarters of the Trump Resistance and a place more than half of America considers the strangest city of them all.

Juneteenth commemorates that day in 1865 – June 19^th – when the Union Army issued a special order to proclaim and enforce freedom for all slaves when it advanced into the state of Texas.

See, even though Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation “ended” U.S. slavery, Texas was a bastion of Confederacy AND the most remote of the slave owning states. Meaning it didn’t adhere to federal law and needed a little…um…prodding…to make Lincoln’s proclamation true reality.

Yet leading conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation are already using the Juneteenth Holiday to say that while there were issues or problems in our history, look at how we…are overcoming them.

Nice sentiment, right? Cause well, Juneteenth is finally a holiday – WHOPEEE!!!!

Well, this would be fine if the half-century struggle to make it a holiday hadn’t been continually squelched by ultra right wing Republican U.S. senators like Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson.

His most recent argument?

Giving workers another day of paid leave would cost too much.

Of course, one presumes he meant money. But the ugly truth is that, as any thinking white person who ever heard a racist sentiment expressed in a segregated room knows, these are coded words to avoid saying out loud that its real threat is to the superiority and dominance of Whiteness as an American institution.

Open the door to Juneteenth, as we now have, and well…THAT COULD ALL BE GONE!!! OMG!!!!!!

See, the new Fox News/Republican Party talking point this week, and likely all through to Election Day, 2022, is the danger of what Juneteenth demands – teaching something called critical race theory in schools.

The entire Fox audience after they hear “critical race theory”

So much so that there is now legislation in Texas (Note: Of all places) that would ban any teacher from the discussion of slavery and the possibility of any institutional racism in America.

Which begs the question of how exactly they will handle explaining future Juneteenth holidays to their students. Perhaps, try to NOT discuss it?

Well, as any one of us who learned about sex from our friends or from porn knows, THAT always works.

Critical race theory is more than 40 years old and hardly the MARIXIST conversion of America’s children that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is now shouting to anyone who unwisely still tries listening to him. In fact, all it really asks is for us to discuss the idea that racism may have contributed to American public policy over the years (i.e. slavery, criminal justice, housing, etc.).

Which is why it’s so confusing when a group like the Heritage Foundation and its chief spokesperson now says making Juneteenth a holiday is the perfect answer to those who are promoting critical race theory…Juneteenth says no, we don’t need to destroy the very structures of this nation, the things that make us great.

That’d be like Anita Bryant proclaiming the legalization of gay marriage, gay adoption and gay teachers in schools proves just how great of a country America is.

(Note: For those of you who don’t know, Ms. Bryant was a C-list singer who spent half her life screaming that we gays were an abomination, a threat to children and a festering infection on the social fabric of American society. Or, well, words to that effect).

Though Ms. Bryant and her ilk are part of the reason why June is Gay Pride Month nationwide, why this weekend in Los Angeles there is a virtual/live celebration parade on the streets for the 51^st straight (Note: No pun intended) year, and why White Straight People don’t need one.

https://twitter.com/jbillinson/status/1136050829469896704?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1136050829469896704%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.popbuzz.com%2Finternet%2Fviral%2Fstraight-pride-meme-boston-parade-2019%2F

That would be one boring parade

Still, if Cruz, Heritage, Johnson, et. al. keep up their intransigence and hypocrisy, who knows? They might marginalize themselves right down the evolutionary scale just enough to lay claim to OUR status. And without mass, or masked, snickers.

I’m clearly joking, kind of. Though no one can say the evils of homophobia and racism didn’t contribute to Pride and Juneteenth. You need an oppressor to break free of in order to celebrate the gloriousness of your survival.

Which is yet another reason why this weekend is confusing.

Especially when you realize both these holidays fall on FATHER’S DAY!!!

Who among us doesn’t have some loaded history with our parents, much as we may love them? And if you don’t, get some therapy or just, well, go away.

I had to look it up in order to find out that Father’s Day was started in the U.S. in 1910 by a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd in honor of her father William, who fought in the Union Army (Note: Thank God!!!) during the Civil War. Sonora was 16 when her Mom died in childbirth and, together with her Dad, helped raise her five other siblings. As the story goes, her single Dad was so exemplary that when he passed away she, and her brothers, wanted to find a way to honor him and all the great fathers of the world.

Nothing about Father’s Day feels controversial until you realize that its origins were around a single man who shared co-parenting duties with his underage daughter for his five other kids. I mean, is that the kind of thing we want to promote? And what about the costs of all of those presents? Not to mention, what if you didn’t have a good father, or no father at all?

Better to avoid the entire subject, or any of these subjects, at all.

Or celebrate each and every one as thoroughly as you can while you still have a chance to carry on about any great thing you get at any key moment in your life.

Madonna – “Holiday”

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: Fox News

Got Beef?

Three Holidays