As I welcomed a new group of college students to their semester “abroad” in Los Angeles this week, I tried to stay focused on the entertainment industry and their future as emerging writers, directors, producers, editors and who knows what else.
Yes, there is a future.
And no, I don’t sugar coat it.
On the other hand, it serves little purpose to go on about the gloom and doom in the air for the last six months since the end of show business has been predicted from the time talkies were first introduced.
I’m not old enough to remember that, or our transition from radio to the revolution of television. But I am old enough to have experienced the shift from black & white to color, then to VCRs, DVDs, cable, on demand, streaming and…
Well, who knows what’s next.
But rest assured, it will be something. Our world has many rewards but there are inevitable downturns where things turn bleak and bleakest. It is in those moments we need to be entertained or simply commiserate over stories about the bad times that somehow make us feel less alone and ready to fight on another day.
So truly, I don’t worry much about the industry, or Gen Z. Especially since, in my experience, they have a keen sixth sense for bullshit.
And boy is it getting thrown at them from everywhere and in much more sophisticated forms. A.I. is predicted to be the death knell of truth but let’s be real here – hasn’t truth already evolved into truthiness or, as the first Trump administration liked to put it – alternative facts?
What a clever excuse for a lie.
Though I much prefer the explanation Picasso gave almost a century ago.
Art Is The Lie That Tells The Truth.
That is at least an aspiration to something approaching honesty about the human story. Not a bad con job by people looking to cash in on a hot streak mostly for themselves in the short term.
There is a lot of hot shot cosplaying these days in the political arena by the current White House administration that I’m betting my Gen Z students already see through and will be smart enough to continue to see through in the coming years.
Otherwise, why would the White House be so apoplectic over college DEI programs, suing (Note: Aka shaking down and/or controlling) major universities and college about who and what we are able to teach to the next generation of aspiring Picassos, Clarence Darrows or Albert Einsteins.
Which begs the question – would Einstein, an immigrant whose life was being threatened as a Jew in Nazi Germany, even gain admittance to the United States under present day rules?
Diversity, equity and inclusion are just that – a rainbow of various truths educators expose their students to in order to help them to see.
See what?
Well, their truths, of course.
If one is unafraid of what is true, then there is no reason to control the facts that young adults get to review, study and learn from in order to determine the course of their journeys.
But if one fears what someone of college age will find out about that Man behind the Curtain, then all the more reason for those institutions to be stopped in their tracks, taken to court and have the many questions they pose redacted from the record in favor of something more, well – unifying.
In the last few weeks the Trump administration has dispatched close to 2300 members of the National Guard from a handful of red states that were once part of the Confederacy to the streets of Washington, D.C. in order to clean up its crime-ridden, dangerous, drug-infested streets.
This is in direct opposition to the majority of D.C. residents, many of whom have taken to the same streets in protest, and to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who notes violent crime has been significantly down in the last two years thanks to new programs the city has initiated.
It reminds me of what happened in my city of Los Angeles last month, when the Guard and ICE agents patrolled a pretty much peaceful L.A. in combat gear and various weaponry while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave a press conference with scads of misinformation. But when our own Senator Alex Padilla tried to question her and correct the record, he was thrown to the ground and handcuffed by her feds for…. well, calling out the b.s.
A variation of this activity occurred in D.C. this week when Vice-President J.D. Vance and Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller zig-zagged past hundreds of protestors into Union Station to ostensibly photo-op/congratulate the Guard and treat them to lunch from Shake Shack.
They and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were roundly booed and initially drowned out with shouts of “Free D.C.” But Vance countered a few minutes later to reporters that the troops were there to, “Free D.C. from being a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the entire world.”
Which is complete fiction, aka alternative facts.
Statistics actually prove those rates went down by one-third since 2023 (Note: Use the google) and that there are dozens and dozens of cities in countries all over the world with significantly higher crime stats and murders.
But this LIE wound up being lost, or shall we say, eclipsed, by more b.s. from Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who seethed that these protestors were crazy communists…seeking to destroy a great American city, along with stupid, elderly white hippies.
Communists? White hippies?
I’m sure young people are as on board with this as we were back in the late 1960s.
But what made it even more callow was Miller and Vance, of all people, ranting that D.C. was a majority Black city that deserved to be safe.
The fact remains that none of the National Guard troops have not been dispatched to majority Black neighborhoods but to landmarks like the National Mall, Lincoln Memorial, Union Station and other tourist destinations. As well as on air force bases and the upscale streets of tony Georgetown.
In other words, places where they can be amply PHOTOGRAPHED, FILMED and show a FICTIONALIZED VERSION of FORCE (Note: As they will in many other cities nationwide. Chicago is next, then San Francisco, New York and a town near you).
Yes, there have been 700 D.C. arrests in the last few weeks but almost none of them have been for violent crime. Most have been immigrants, protestors, the homeless and the drug-addicted. Disappeared and often not easy to track down.
Those of us who have seen this kind of thing before and have survived long enough to witness the ebbs and flows of the world, especially need to help young people to understand the difference between sloppy, drooly lies that profess reality vs. honest protests in the streets demanding a course correction from the real life edicts of slick, overheated, recycled bullshit.
This is not to say that they don’t already get it. But as we have learned over generations, there is great strength in numbers. Not to mention, it can also inspire a few cool stories, as well as other pieces of art.
Marvin Gaye – “What’s Going On”
notes from a chair 