Everyone is Mean

…Well, not everyone.

But it certainly got your attention, didn’t it?

And that’s because it’s difficult to engage with the news – which these days includes any forms of media, including the social kind – and not be slapped in the face by the type of seething rage I did my best to run away from as a little kid.

The kind of foaming at the mouth anger a bully or mean girl expressed by punching, kicking, biting, cursing – or worse – before some adult would step in, pull the plug, pull them off and, finally, calm everything down.

Oh, where have all the adults gone???

Not that I myself wasn’t pissed off often at many, many, MANY people and about many, many, MANY things way back when.

I can recall my tiny existential mind seriously thinking, and with equal weight:

Why are people racist?
Why do some kids beat up others over something as dumb as a football or baseball game?
Why can’t I wear what I want to school, and….
How come my parents can be so continuously, and consistently, embarrassing ALL of the time????

Even though I don’t have a satisfying answer to any one of those now, I can honestly state I didn’t know how good I had it back then.

Because right now it’s far worse and a hell of a lot MEANER.

(Note: My husband thinks I should say mean-spirited because most people are not innately mean. But since he’s the far nicer of the two of us, I’ll stick with mean – to the bone).

And normally they’re not even that funny!

I don’t want to make this political but I’m just recovering from Covid, and a weeks worth of TV news watching, where I’ve been continuously slapped in the face by the Trump of it all.

I mean, I’d much rather write about the brave, smart, thoughtfulness of Zelenskyy but we don’t live in a Zelenskyy world right now, do we? In fact, it’s actually that kind of world we’re trying to get back.

Instead, what we have is this revelation from a piece in The Atlantic about the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley:

It was in 2019, during his welcoming ceremony at a military base in Virginia. Milley had chosen an extremely disabled, wheelchair-bound vet named Luis Avila to sing God Bless America, which he did wonderfully despite having lost a leg and endured two strokes and brain damage as a result of five tours of combat.

Yet after the song was over, then Pres. Donald J. Trump marched directly over to the general and snapped to his face:

Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that.

This statement echoes another from a New Yorker article when, during the planning of an intended big military style parade, Trump warned his then Chief of Staff John Kelly that he:

…didn’t want any wounded guys in the parade. It wouldn’t look good for me.

Which echoes Trump’s infamous putdown line about former POW and then Sen. John McCain in the 2016 Republican primary campaign:

I like people who WEREN’T captured.

And thematically gels with Trump skipping a traditional visit in France to a cemetery containing the remains of 1800 dead American soldiers in 2018, when he told his staff:

Why should I go to that cemetery. It’s filled with losers.

It’s not surprising, so much as appalling, when you consider the guy has pretty much clinched the Republican nomination for president in 2024, a party that sports as one of its primary constituent groups, the Religious Right.

You want mean, continue to vote for and support Trump, MAGA and Trumpism. And then pray or confess to whatever your God of choice might be that at worst you are merely sometimes mean-spirited.

Of course, if you think Joe Biden, 80, is too old (Note: He’s a mere three years older than Trump, 77 – and a lot thinner. Oops, now I’ m being mean! ) and too liberal (Note II: As compared to whom – Bernie? Or me and my friends????) —

Right behind in the Republican pack, is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 45. A few weeks ago in a stump speech for his faltering presidential campaign, he ranted this about retired former NIH director Anthony Fauci, 81,

I’m so sick of seeing him….Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.

No, I am NOT embellishing. He’s been saying it for more than A YEAR.

And, I just want to state for the record:

DeSantis – 5’9”

Fauci: 5’7”

The Chair: 5’6” (though I used to be 5’7”)

And that:

– DeSantis consistently wears heels to make himself look taller, hates all things Disney and shames kids on camera for wearing masks and eating too much sugar.

-Fauci is responsible for guiding us through the Covid pandemic and facilitating the invention and distribution of the five Covid vaccines/boosters that probably saved me a hospital intensive care visit in the last several weeks.

-The Chair has a sense of humor and has a Joy Inside Out doll sitting in his home office, alongside a poster with a quote from Hillary Clinton that tells you to keep getting up when someone knocks you down and to never listen to anyone who says you can’t or shouldn’t go on.

Fine, Joy and Hillary (Note: Ugh, and The Chair) are not perfect, and there are certainly some meanies in the Democratic Party.

But…mean to the bone?

This past week I watched a wrap up of the legal woes of Trump, our twice-impeached former president and cult leader. It began by telling us that He is the FIRST U.S. PRESIDENT in our 234 year HISTORY to be INDICTED for crimes and that it has happened FOUR DIFFERENT TIMES this year.

In Washington, D.C. for the Jan 6^th insurrection. Among the crimes: a sustained effort to prevent the vote from being counted in a federal election; interrupting Congress’ counting of the vote; conspiracy to deny citizens the right to vote nationwide.
In Georgia: Running a Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization that, among other things, tried to get its secretary of state to overturn the election; change the votes by finding illegal votes; throwing out already existing votes.
In Florida: Thirty-two counts of willful retention of classified documents, hiding them in boxes and then lying about it. (Note: And my fave, testimony that he used them as “to do” and “doodle pads” where he wrote notes to his assistant).
In NYC: Faking business records to reimburse a personal lawyer ordered to pay off $130,000 to a porn star the defendant had sex with. And in doing so, accruing 34 felony charges of lies about the various businesses and corporate holdings used to bill the reimbursement money from.

This is all to say, in the oft-quoted words of one 13^th century Turkish philosopher:

The fish rots from the head down.

If we really want to clean up this mess of meanness we’re in, we might follow that lead.

Metaphorically, of course.

Taylor Swift – “Mean” (Taylor’s Version)

03.26.23

by notesfromachair

A Sad State

The state flower of Florida is the orange blossom and so is the painted-on complexion of its most infamous resident.

Yet that’s not most concerning for me about what’s being churned out of that region on the rest of us at this moment in time.

A charter K-12 school in its state capitol called the Tallahassee Classical School, a place that literally markets its mission as training the minds and improving the hearts of young people through a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts, several weeks ago forced a principal to resign for daring to allow a sixth-grade art teacher to show her students an image of Michelangelo’s David, arguably one of THE most regarded works of sculptural art ever made.

Yes, of course David is totally nude, and includes his… penis.

But he is also 17 feet tall, made out of marble and to this day receives more than a million visitors annually at his home in the Accademia Gallery in Florence.

I’ve been there and spent time with Him and I can honestly say nothing prepares you for how truly magnificent the experience is up close. But as a gay man I’m also here to tell you — it’s not even remotely about his… penis.

Not that there is anything wrong with it.

Oh no Chairy, you made Colin nervous giggle.

My husband referred me to the David story broadcast on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show this week and she gives a far more detailed rendition of it than I can here.

Click here to watch the segment… and yes, this is NUTS

Even though I am truly fascinated by the parent who thought David was obscene, the two more families that called for the ousting of the art teacher, and the movement that ensued that forced the principal of that charter school to resign.

Still, the David will get over this. The fact is, He’s not new to controversy. After He was unveiled in the early 1500s the Catholic Church and eventually the Vatican found his nudity so reprehensible that he was given a fig leaf to cover his… penis.

And there that fig leaf remained for approximately 400 years until it was eventually decided that mass society might be mature enough to handle what He was given by Michelangelo – which when you think of it is merely a replication of what the Church believes God gave man.

It makes one wonder if you simply need to be made of stone in order to battle through centuries of insanity and ignorance and still remain standing.

Well, perhaps not.

Grace Linn is 100 years old, made of flesh and blood, and last week she stood up to the Martin Country School Board at a meeting, lambasting the powers that be for banning dozens of books, from school libraries and classroom curriculums, due to pressure from conservative and religious groups.

Among them are classics like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Interestingly, one deals with the enslavement of women and the other the enslavement of non-white people but both are set against episodes of murder, societal mayhem and occasional sex, all topics easily found in any version of another classic – The Bible.

In her short speech, Ms. Linn told us about her husband, who was killed at the age of 26 during WWII defending democracy, the constitution and freedom.

She then went on to point out that one of the freedoms the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read books they banned.

And that in our country the freedom to read, protected by the first amendment, is our essential RIGHT and the DUTY of our democracy. And it is continually under attack by both the public and private groups that think THEY hold the TRUTH.

She said it far more effectively into the faces of those school board members than any of the go f-k yourselves I would likely say to them in person. Or to Florida’s governor, and likely 2024 presidential hopeful, Ron DeSantis – he of the already tired campaign slogan, Florida is where woke goes to die.

DeSantis is currently campaigning across the country against the perils of being awake while one of his century-old constituents is warning us not to go to sleep and avert our minds from reality.

And they say that the age of 80, Joe Biden is too old to lead?

The truth is that it sometimes takes someone a bit more… seasoned… to see the big picture in perilous times. And I say that not merely as someone who at this point could generously be considered to be, well, spicy.

The American Library Association tells us it received a record 1200 challenges to books in 2022, which was almost double the amount it received the previous year, which up to that point was the all-time high.

Those 2022 challenges cover more than 2500 books and are from national conservative groups like Moms for Liberty, an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one. Included are pretty much what you’d expect but thrown into the mix are things like a children’s biography of the late Puerto Rican baseball star Roberto Clemente – so great that even younger Me was one his fans – and a series of family friendly science fiction YA novels from… James Patterson?

The guy whose non-cutting edge paperbacks you couldn’t turn away from at the airport even if you tried has created a series of novels about winged teenagers (Note: Maximum Ride) that’s deemed too cutting edge for that typical air commuter’s kid to read?

Truly?

It’d be one thing if I were ranting about the 100 plus anti LGBTQ bills before state legislatures in 22 states in 2023. Not that I’m not and not that there aren’t and not that they are any less scary or important.

Or warning straight audiences across the country that this year’s June gay pride parades won’t be nearly as fun for you to attend with your kids, as I know so many of you do, because of the fact that eight states are already loaded up with bills to severely restrict or ban drag performances.

But the idea of living in a burnt orange world of rage and Florida-like repression really should make us all stop and think while we still can.

And not about naked marble man or his…um… thing.

“The State of Florida” – Less Than Jake

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: ron desantis

Everyone is Mean

A Sad State