Tag Archives: iran

06.22.25
by

Nuclear Jinx

I had so wanted to be frivolous here this week and then Saturday night happened. 

Oh, what the hell.  Here’s Jinkx Monsoon, Broadway star and former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, doing one of the most entertaining impressions I’ve ever seen of…

Oh, just watch it.

Okay, fine. 

NOW, let’s bring down the room.

Four guys you’d never want your daughter, son, sister or brother to date stood in the halls of the White House on the evening of June 21st, 2025 and told us we just launched a bunch of mega-bombs on a Middle Eastern country of 90 million people in order to prevent said country from putting together some sort of nuclear material into some sort of weapon that said country was supposedly weeks, months or years away from…. creating… enriching… launching?…. obtaining?

None of us seems to quite know.   

“Weapons of Mass Destruction” anyone?

Perhaps POTUS does, but he’s not saying.   Exactly.  Or pretty much any other way.

As for the three other guys behind him – J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth (Note: If this was the track, they’re be an entry – aka three horses owned by the same stable –  1 a, b and c)  – they remained suited up and silent in navy suits behind the boss, who was center stage in the blue jewel-toned number.

I mean, they might tell us more by the time you read this.  Perhaps in a scheduled press conferences on June 22 or on June 23 in a top secret security briefing to our representatives in Congress.  Who are supposed to know this stuff ahead of time and vote before the U.S. launches bombs into another country and ostensibly starts a war.

Of course, that didn’t happen.

Totally normal stuff here, right?

 And at no point last night was the word war mentioned in their four minute “presentation.”

So I guess that means we’re…. not in a war… with Iran?

Or are we?

I don’t even know what now

I mean when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took us into the Iraq War twenty plus years ago, at least there was a vote.  And evidence, as specious and/or made up as it was.  They even called it an actual WAR and gave it a name – Operation Iraqi Freedom.  (Note: Yes, we eventually saw what they did there).  But this time there was no vote, no evidence – false or otherwise –  and nary a peep to any members in the Senate or the House of Representatives.

Just the Four Horsemen of the Christian Right telling us they did this thing that wasn’t a war.  Just a lot of… and I quote:

…Great American patriots who flew those magnificent machines tonight…. and no military in the world could’ve done what we did…. Not even close… There’s never been a military that could do what just took place.

In case you were wondering.

Grammar matters

FYI, the magnificent machines were B-2 bombers and what they dropped were 30,000 pound bunker busters (MOBs) that bore straight into the ground to presumably blow up nuclear material thousands of feet below thousands of feet of concrete.  What happens to the remains of that nuclear material, and what the destruction caused by bombs weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds will be, is anyone’s guess.  But presumably, like always, it’s all in the name of “peace.”

Seriously, what could go wrong?

And while you’re contemplating that, here’s Jinkx telling a dirty celebrity story.

Now remember that the man leading us into this war – or whatever he claims it is – is the same person who took over the Kennedy Center a few months ago because a handful of times, among its hundreds of thousands of evenings of entertainment, it served as a venue host for drag shows.  This same person also runs a federal government whose national suicide hotline will no longer refer trans or gay kids to the LGBTQ+ hotline specifically for them, run by The Trevor Project.  That’s an actual truth bomb that just happened that you can read about here. 

Jinkx Monsoon and her kind, be damned.

Totally fine!!

Meanwhile, stay safe. 

As for those of us in Los Angeles, luckily we now have an extra 700 Marines on our streets, courtesy of POTUS, to keep us safe….

…From immigrants.

“One Day More”  from “Les Miserables” – Jinkx Monsoon (playing every role)

05.19.19
by

The Next Generation

I spent the last two weeks reading 30 original screenplays and television pilots from graduating college seniors and here’s what I know –

It is a dark, dystopian world out there where pretty much NO ONE tells you the truth.

Of course, I already knew that but I’m almost three times their age.   I mean, when I got out of school in the seventies I knew the world could be a crappy place but what I was equally sure about was that there was also hope.

At least there was hope for better fashion #whoamIkidding #imkillingit

This was because I was as sure as shit that my friends and I were going to be able to change things.  At least a little.  I knew this as sure I knew I was going to live alone and lonely in a huge Malibu beach house, clutching my Oscar as I fell asleep.  That is if I didn’t die in my twenties of some horrible disease, a fact I was 100% convinced was a 50-50 possibility.

Well, of course I was wrong.  Here I am almost more than middle-aged in a relationship of 32 years with nary an Oscar in sight, living way, way across town in a house in the Hollywood Hills.

Yeah, I’m cool

Like many dreams, mine were fairly off but not totally unrealized.  Personal life aside, I did make it to L.A. and the movie business and worked in several categories where one could conceivably get nominated for an Oscar.

Right.  I know.  A grown up with a dream.

This, of course, is the point.  It’s not that my many wonderful students don’t have dreams.  It’s that judging from the past few weeks the majority of them don’t believe their best fantasies can take hold and flourish.

pretty much!

And, I mean, who can blame them?  Sometimes I turn on the news and can’t believe what I’m hearing and seeing.  When I read the newspaper it’s even worse.  And I came of age in the Nixon-Watergate era and spent the last years of my pre-teens watching Robert F. Kennedy get shot live on TV.  And this was several months after that same station almost got to cover the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. live instead of merely its bloody aftermath.

Those extreme acts, combined with a seemingly endless war in Vietnam and the Ohio National Guard murdering four innocent students who happened to be walking by anti-war protestors at Kent State University, made it seem like there was nothing the elders of the American status quo wouldn’t do to hold onto their power.

The general message to the young was:

We will literally kill you in a war or at school if you get too uppity and, if you don’t believe us, just give it a try.  You could easily find yourself in jail, overseas with a gun or in a morgue for doing nothing more than disagreeing with us if you’re not careful. 

Then or now? Does it matter? #Amen

We didn’t realize it at the time but in truth the country did have a modicum of sanity left.  As young people we innately understood we lived in an environment where freedom of speech was the norm, our federal elected representatives had just put the de-segregation of society into law and journalists were almost universally lauded by most, if not all, as the sacred last bastion of truth-tellers.

It was a world that had suddenly and almost completely gone totally off the rails but somehow we knew it was salvageable.  We had gone to the moon, you could still burn the American flag in the street and not get arrested and, if all else failed, the pleasures of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll would get you through until you entered what could only be described as the blissful golden Age of Aquarius.

Plus.. we had Cher

I so want that for the young people that I teach who are going out into the world today and it angers me each day that they have come of age into an alternate reality of stupidity, division and denial.

No one middle-aged can imagine what it’s like to grow up in a time where you could easily and routinely be shot up in your school.  In the sixties and seventies we had fire drills, not re-enactments of how to act or where to hide when a random gunman might happen to enter the building and aim a military style assault rifle to your head or the head of your friend, or younger brother or sister.

This is their reality. #sadtruths

As much as most of my contemporaries might have loathed Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and later, Ronald Reagan, none of us grew up hearing the president of the United States making allowances for white supremacists.  Or calling the American press the enemy of the people and degrading the indisputable facts they report as fake news.

Or, more importantly, respond this way when asked in front of the White House if the U.S. is about to go to war in the Middle East:

I hope not.

ARE YOU FREAKIN KIDDING ME?!?!

Say what you will about any of those men (Note: And I’ve said plenty) when they spoke it was with a definitive thought, not with the vague possibility that at any moment something absolutely horrible can and probably will happen so we’d gosh darn better be on guard for….well, anything.  And by anything he truly means ANYTHING.  Just ask him, as the press often does, if you don’t believe it.

Dystopian?  Dark?  Sadly, I fear these young people have it exactly right and I couldn’t be more pissed off about it.   We all should be.

The Who – “My Generation”