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”

01.02.22

by notesfromachair

2022 and Beyond

As we enter into the third year of the COVID pandemic, I’m optimistic.

Did you know the flu epidemic/pandemic in the early 20^th century lasted two years and perhaps beyond into a fourth wave?

What makes us think we’d be any different? Besides our vaccines, we have a lot more ways to get close and get infected.

It’s so easy to think the horrible will never end, the future is bleak and that it won’t EVER be as good as it was.

When I catch myself going down this rabbit hole I’m reminded of what the late, great Stephen Sondheim lyricized in the vastly underrated Merrily We Roll Along.

…That’s what everybody does

Blame the way it is on the way it was

On the way it never ever was…

On a lighter metaphor, movies were not supposed to exist once television was born and theatre, well, that would soon be spoken as widely as Latin.

So much for prophecy.

Movies are still here but the way we access them have changed. The same with theatre. And television. And music.

Who remembers DVDs, VCRs, eight tracks, tape decks and…radio?

I mean, radio as a primary art form that’s on the front page or brain of anything?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

But on that latter point, who listens to PODCASTS?

New Pod from a Chair Episodes coming soon!

You are so no better than your great grandparents.

Social media is not the revolutionary means to the end of the world but the evolution of a world where change knows no end.

Yeats famously prophesized in a 1919 poem, the center cannot hold and we’re still here.

This despite the fact that phrase was pilfered and rephrased by any number of 1960s social revolutionaries who saw the end coming, and was recently used as the title of the Netflix doc on the life of writer Joan Didion, The Center Will Not Hold.

Totalitarian reign and pushback. They leave Afghanistan, we desert Afghanistan. Our weapons of mass destruction, they lied about weapons of mass destruction, our existence teeters on the brink of mass destruction.

This is not to minimize any one of the above issues or their many cousins that are nipping at the heels of all of our destructions.

It is simply to remember that despite all of these changes certain core issues and ways of humanity are ALWAYS the same.

It’s simply the players, scenery and mode of import that makes it feel different. To US.

I imagine this is what both Sondheim AND Betty White knew well before their ends.

On that note, it’s hard to lose our beloved elders, isn’t it? But by anyone’s measure, living to 91 and 99 is almost more than we can ask given the realities of human frailty. Yet, we never get enough of people we love, like and admire from afar and near.

This is a particularly heart ripping truth when it comes to our closest friends, family and loved ones.

Death can be random and cruel, particularly when it comes to the young, but it’s also rote and predictable. It’s always been the way of the world. We can extend life a bit but THAT will also NEVER change.

At least as far as we know.

That is, unless you have Irishman level de-aging tech available to you

Which brings us back to the exciting but scary part that has so many of us freaking out about 2022; what we DON’T know.

Which is….A LOT.

My late second Mom, an avid reader, once told me when I was feeling hopeless and down that life was like a great book, you never know what will happen when you turn the page.

Expect the unexpected, weather the storm of horribleness and celebrate every second of luck and good fortune that will inevitably come your way.

If this sounds like a Forest Gumpism, a movie I could never stomach, it doesn’t to me. Her advice wasn’t akin to life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get, even though it might be read this way now. Rather than being about the randomness of life, I took it as the certainty that a good piece of story will always deliver to you; the ups and downs, the inescapable heartache and the always to be counted on moments of joy.

Though perhaps, for me, it was simply the book/story metaphor. I could relate a lot more to that than some stupid container of processed sugar able to undo you or reward you beyond your wildest dreams depending on what road you decided to paw.

It could have also been the messenger.

My second Mom, meaning my stepmom – a parental figure who only becomes such by coincidence of marriage but can truly emerge as a lot more than that depending on who they and you are – was not a habitual advice giver and problem solver. Though always, she was honest. Some would say to a fault.

So when she took the time to challenge me with a metaphor of what life truly was (and would be) it compelled me to listen. And woke me up from my malaise in an instant.

I think this idea is what sustains me through so many problematic moments, both personal and societal.

That the secret is that not one of us, the most talented or smartest or even both that any human can be, will solve any of these issues on our own. Nor are we likely to even manage to get through them.

We depend on each other. Not only the people we love and trust but on all of those charlatans who we loathe.

The best of them show us the way to survive and grow. The worst of them try and seduce us into drowning in their bile and cynicism.

Not that I haven’t been known to be a cynic or offered my own bile out into the world, dressed up and spewed out as wisdom at times.

It takes a long time, often a lifetime, to become wise enough to understand what is being offered (and why) from each source and to move forward in the best way possible. And I believe the most difficult part of this is recognizing that you – yourself – can be quite an unreliable narrator.

They (Note: Whoever THEY are) say trust yourself, but that doesn’t always work. When you suspect you – yourself – are not to be trusted you need to turn to people like your second Mom, one among a small handful of someone elses that we all need to cultivate, that inner circle of truth, and then decide what the best options are.

You can’t sit all alone in your room and figure it all out yourself. That’s myopic and creepy and just plain dumb. And it will NEVER get you through 2022 in any sort of meaningful or even pleasing way.

Once I realized this small fact and made it into a strategy, I became more optimistic.

A group effort with you at the helm but never as sole narrator and dictator, benevolent though you might think you are.

No ONE of us is to be entirely trusted. But together, with the benefits of our small group (Note: Which doesn’t mean isolating from the thoughts and logic of the rest of the world at large), we will see a way forward.

Through 2022 and into plots twists and turns we never could have imagined or pulled off by ourselves.

“Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight” – Jennifer Hudson from SING

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: tucker carlson

Got Beef?

2022 and Beyond