The Death of Meanness

Rush Limbaugh died yesterday.

And that isn’t to say we should mourn his passing with kind words and flowers accepted in lieu of donations.

Because we shouldn’t.

As a rule, we must not speak ill of the dead, but that was how Limbaugh became wealthy in the first place, popularizing an ability to say or do the cruelest thing, in response to raw human suffering. Did he host a regular segment on his radio show called “AIDS Updates,” in which read off a list of people who died from HIV that came packaged with its own theme song, Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love That Way Again?” You betcha.

Did he once joke that the Clintons had a pet dog in the White House, only for the punchline to be that he was referring to Chelsea Clinton, their actual 13-year-old daughter? Of course, he did.

Simply put, Rush Limbaugh was a “man” who delighted in wickedness as a source of income and never repented, or did the late career goodwill rehabilitation tour. The reverse of that, if this is even possible: Even in the last year of his life, he pumped misinformation out about COVID-19.

But, more than just broadcasting his own cruelty onto the airwaves and into the world, he radiated and mainstreamed inhumanity — which trickled, down if you will, into many facets of our society.

You see it in every Facebook feed where a user reacts with laughter to a post of a celebrity telling about the heart attack and stroke they had during an overdose.

It’s fair to say there’s more than a correlation to the rise of Limbaugh in the late 80s to the ascendency of Donald Trump to President of the United States in just a few decades. They both rose to prominence in the 1980s, the Reagan Era, when Conservative and American ideology was defined by hedonism, doing and saying what made them feel good, regardless of the harm it inflicted. News and viewpoints were no longer mandated by a fairness doctorate which mandating presenting both points of view.

When that ideology fell out of favor before the American public, it became conservative policy in the following decades. The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and fiscal responsibility, slowed faded away to prefer victimization, racial dog whistles, false prophets and scapegoating.

You see, we can’t have Trump without Limbaugh, where the conditions of a demagogue could thrive.

I bring this up to suggest possibly, we’ve reached an inflection point with allowing this kind of cruel misinformation and outright lying to go unchecked by the powers that be, especially when it is big tech pretending they’re not liable.

We have lived with Trump for five years and attempts to, minimize the trauma of Gold Star families, justify and obfuscate locking fellow humans in cages, to say nothing of the mothers they’ve sterilized, shrugging at almost 500,000 Americans dying from the coronavirus.

Eventually, we tire of the cruelty and flippancy of which these people view the frailty of human life.

We see the impact of giving a mad autocrat multiple platforms to spend months sewing distrust of our free elections and fomenting an insurrection to pervert the will of the people. And we’re not even mentioning the misinformation Trump amplified about COVID-19 throughout most of 2020.

Is it any wonder that misinformation dropped when Trump was de-platformed?

Maybe responsibility is coming to the internet? After months of similarly amplifying misinformation about masks and voter fraud in November, Gina Carano was fired from The Mandalorian. Are we to defend the honor of Disney, a billion-dollar corporation? No.

But we finally see what happens when inhumanity festers and multiplies.

For the longest time, responsibility on social media platforms was treated abstractly by these tech giants. They could feign ignorance that their algorithms were pushing their users to the fringes of society. The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 presented them with a clear causation that they could no longer realistically ignore.

We’ve learned the hard way that life is not cheap. We know because we lived through 2020.

The Premature Political Obituary for Jeff Flake

Here lies the political ruins and ambitions of Jeff Flake, the supposed senior senator from the Great State of Arizona.

On a superficial level, Jeff likes to proselytize about his ideals from the podium of the Senate, like Goldwater Conservatism, simple human decency, bipartisanship, advocating for victims, and “regular order of the Senate,” as his former colleague John McCain would call it.

…but at the end of day, his actions speak louder than his Hallmark sympathies.  He’ll have the audacity to talk about believing sexual assault victims one day on the floor of the Senate and then later that same week, voice support for the advancement of said alleged perpetrator.

Today, we finally found out everything we needed to know about Jeff. After his posturing toward the #metoo movement, he voiced his support to vote to Brett Kavanaugh out of the Judiciary Committee, where he is a member, and one step closer to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court. Despite Kavanaugh being accused of multiple assaults by women, no formal FBI investigation has been initiated by the President, even at the urging of American Bar Association, of which the judge is a member, yet Jeff still voted for him. So much for regular order…

The incident in question I want to spotlight is Jeff’s conduct afterward. Once again Jeff had the opportunity to stand for something, not even any fixed ideological beliefs but simple human dignity and justice, but even this meager standard he couldn’t abide by. On the walk back elevator ride to his office, where he could hide from his inevitable act of cowardice, the escape hatch  — I mean — elevator, wouldn’t shut because a rape survivor stood in the door’s path and called out Jeff’s cowardice.

“That’s what you’re telling all women in America, that they don’t matter. They should just keep it to themselves because if they have told the truth you’re just going to help that man to power anyway,” the woman told him.

It is here where Flake showed his true convictions as a wimp. He didn’t afford the simple dignity of making eye contact with this woman, a survivor, looking down at his shoes like he was a choir boy receiving a scolding from the head nun, desperately pushing the ‘Close Door’ button, a sweet release couldn’t come soon enough. The contrast of this noted coward and the courage of a sexual assault survivor cannot be minimized.

But, everything we need to know about Jeff Flake will be informed by this moment going forward. Like a flake of dandruff, a supposed act of courage that’s revealed as a caul for which we can see has no depth and is breakable to another’s will. The posturing of a political lion, yet the almost literal proverbial Empty Suit.

We cannot pretend to know or see the future, but in this instance we can see the rest of Jeff’s life just fine. Probably a few years as a lobbyist after his retirement where all the new blood in both Houses will relentlessly mock him behind his back, both Democrats and Republicans alike united on how much Sad Sack Flake STILL has no convictions. From there onto the boards of a handful of local charities, with a dozen other rich benefactors who’ve never had to work for a meal.

Occasionally, he’ll be summoned from his insulated community in Paradise Valley or Fountain Hills to black tie events and galas where seats cost $5,000 a piece, in the name of some charity where they can donate a couple thousand dollars to not make them feel it is not a total act of banality. He’ll flash that bright 50,000 Watt smile for the official event photographer, as the grey pigment naturally overtakes his sandy blonde hair, making its way toward thinning in the back.

His sons may follow him into politics, and just as how Ben Quayle proved to be a total schmuck like his father, the Flake children will do their father proud.

It’s rather ironic that his last act of capitulation in the Senate will be for another Fortunate Son who was born into wealth and never needed to move their fingers much to earn their stature and connections.

Just as how he was never a stalwart for anything in his meaningless existence as a legislator, he will likewise be an non-entity as a private citizen. I hope he proves, we as a, country wrong, but when you’re on a limb, and Jeff Flake is essentially your only lifeline, then you’re pretty much fucked.

Manifest, your flight is cancelled

TV Shows with a central mystery suck. This trend began in 2004 when Lost milked six seasons out of survivors dealing with the weird shenanigans on a deserted island. Smoke monsters and polar bears be damned.

It was compelling television in the same way how Gallagher randomly emerging from the shadows to smash watermelons would be considered suspenseful.

But, I’m not here to talk about Lost. No.

Networks have tried their damnedest to attempt to run alongside its younger cable and streaming siblings but the more it tries, it looks like the 60 year old in the bedazzled Ed Hardy jeans.

Fourteen years later, Manifest, which will begin airing on NBC tonight, is the latest show not to learn from the past. No, I’m not saying from this from the benefit of May 2019 when it will most certainly be cancelled.

I recognize that this statement is rather definitive and I might have egg in my face if I’m wrong. But I’m willing to grin and bear it. So I’m underlining it for later possible embarrassment.

As someone who has lived through Surface, Prison Break, Vanished, Flash Forward, The Event, Under the Dome, Revolution, Hostages, Quantico and Designated Survivor, these shows never work.

Any seasoned TV watcher can fill out a Mad-Lib of these shows and their storylines: the abdication of creating interest characters, a mysterious cabal organization with far-reaching influences, hacky twists and turns to keep you interested, abstractly exotic-named MacGuffin that the viewer and creative team don’t know what it will be, awful child actors, solve-one-mystery-introduce-two-more, wait, that character is treacherous???…

To quote All the President’s Men, “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

Every couple of years, a bunch of desperate, underpaid (or would that be overpaid…) writers fall back on these usual bag of tricks when that initial premise reveals how hollow it really is, and they’re out of the job again the following May.

And yet, like a college student awakening on the porcelain tile after a heavy night of drinking, you can bet a gullible television exec will hit the keg again.

 

 

I Prefer Fascism in Movie Theaters

Since we’re actively flirting with authoritarians in our American government, we should just quit the charade.

We scream at strangers over the internet. We’re totally okay paying public education teachers poverty level wages, and then having the audacity to say they should be armed against active shooters. We shoot people whose driving standards are different to ours. We rationalize meeting despots for glorified photo ops. We freely pollute our Earth in every conceivable way, devastating the resources of the future generations long after we’re dead and gone. We actually put children in fucking cages and then actively obstruct justice if any breach of trust occurs.

Civility is fucking dead, so why not embrace a limited application of fascism in certain situations? Take for instance in movie theaters, where I’m sure a modest majority might embrace a brutalist philosophy.

In defiance of those little warnings before the start of movies, I’ve seen a lot of rude, abhorrent assholes at the movies recently. Since we’re apparently okay as a society condoning the things as described above, and rationalizing it afterward, we should extend the vestige to the movie theater, one of the last places on Earth we view and interact with each other with equal footing.

We’ve all seen the asshole two rows ahead of you pull out his smartphone (with the really fucking bright display) during the movie. And if you’re like me, you’ve fantasized about telling this ruffin to put his freakin’ phone away. But like masturbation, it’s just that, only fantasy.

Personally I would prefer the Big Brother method of corralling filmgoers. Everyone’s locked down for the entirety of the movie, barring trips to the bathroom. (There’s a thin line before fascism and sadism, you know.) So how about we install a dome surveillance camera over the room of the theater and if the night vision picks up some dick pulling out his phone to checkout an app, two tall imposing figures wearing black will come and forcibly eject the guy!

Alamo Drafthouse kinda has my back on this.

We should totally be okay with a shadowy, ethically immoral entity governing the theaters! If we’re okay with private prisons violating prisoners rights and committing endless human rights violations, then this isn’t a bridge too far!

Shame works wonders! Imagine having to travel to some squad room within the theater, where you have to bail out your significant other since they took out their phone to text somebody! Wouldn’t you be embarrassed to pick them up! What if someone sees you… We’re not okay with drunk driving and we could instill this belief in the next generation. Nevermind the Supreme Court! It’s not like they’re nonpartisan anymore!

Or what about those stupid kids or rednecks who won’t stop yapping during the summer popcorn flick? Or what about the person who brings their baby to the next Man of Steel film? In this instance, I gleefully envision a recreation of that one scene early in Con Air where an inmate spits on the guard who responds by having a cohort duct tape the prisoner’s mouth and throw a mesh bag over their face. If it’s uncomfortable for us why should it be comfortable for them…

Or in the least likely scenario in the best of worlds, we could inundate movie theaters with enough complaints and calls to action to make them bring the hammer down, as recommended by bloody-disgusting. But then again, who are we kidding?

 

The sky is falling, I am learning to live with it.

The only way I can describe it as feeling like a deflatable balloon. When a balloon loses its air, the rubber mass is still intact but the air that gives it its distinctive shape is absent.

I get up and prepare for work yesterday, as I would do on a regular workday, but something is different today. I have awaken and found out Anthony Bourdain has died. Of an apparent suicide. Some odd sort of autopilot mode kicks in within my body. I go about my normal routine when getting ready to go to work. Make breakfast. Eat on your bed. Brush your teeth. Get your work clothes on. Nerve-endings are connecting with the brain and doing as they’re told but there’s no internal thoughts to supplement it. In other words, Blankness. The only deviations this morning is I make an omelette to honor my hero and I eat in relative silence.

I come to realize much later on in the day that I am in shock. This is uncharted territory.

It’s become some sort of twisted ritual that my idols die overnight while I rest and I awake to see the macabre news notification on my phone. On this particular morning, a text from my mother is the messenger, followed by one or two other notifications from official news sources. Last May, Chris Cornell died more or less the same way for me.

Some phrases you prepare for the contingency of the subject and action or verb eventually carrying out in the real world. There are some phrases my brain wasn’t equipped to process. “Anthony bourdain died,” the exact text my mom sent me is one of them.

It was improbable in my brain before Friday morning that Bourdain would take his own life. It still is. What were the signs? CNN is currently airing some repeats of ‘Parts Unknown,’ his travel show on the network, and I occasionally watch and wonder why did he do it? I’m at a disadvantage for only knowing the man from afar but I still want to know.

I suspect many are grappling with the same question…

How do you go about your life when one of your teenage heroes is prematurely dead? I’m still trying to figure that out.

I awoke this morning in a better mood, with slightly more spring in my step, yet when I go to the gym and I cannot go forth in my workout routine. After the first set of sit-ups on the bench, I sit up and see myself in those floor-to-ceiling mirrors and am struck by the blankness looking back at me. There’s none of the usual determination in my expression. Later that day, my mother confirms to me that I looked “gloomy” earlier when she saw me. I’m still hung up on the question of his motivation to end his own life.

Diversions seem to be working. I go to a thrift store after the gym, and go to the movies afterward and those things take my mind off his suicide temporarily.

I lost a close friend, as everyone feels now, and I’m definitely going through a grieving process. As I’m writing this down, it still feels selfish to devote a blog post to this, my reaction to him dying, even if it’s likely good for my own mental health.

I shouldn’t focus on myself when he leaves behind hundreds of real life friends, as well as loved ones, Asia Argento, to say nothing of his 11-year-old daughter, who I can’t even fathom what she’s experiencing losing her father.

All I can hope for is some improvement from the last day and not feeling as awful.

Anthony Bourdain. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.

 

RIP Anthony Bourdain – 1956 – 2018

If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or has had thoughts of harming themselves or taking their own life, get help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) provides 24/7, free, confidential support for people in distress, as well as best practices for professionals and resources to aid in prevention and crisis situations.

 

No, Your Child Has Never Felt The Urge to Snort a Condom

The teenage Parkland activists not only gave me hope that a wedge issue like gun violence could be addressed legislatively but also that the average teenager was perhaps more perceptive and intelligent than I gave them credit for.

Instead, it’s the adults, I think we should worry more about.

For the second time in a few weeks, I’ve seen hyperbolic headlines about crazes the kids supposedly indulge in. First, it was a few YouTube videos, which made parents and news directors shit their pants, depicting teenagers bitting into those Tide bleach pods for some reason, as part of some challenge. Then, just this past week, the latest “teenage craze” has been snorting a condom up their nose, which is suppose to go elsewhere on the body I believe…  

Just how not every scrawny Caucasian Trump supporter is an active shooter, I believe the problem to be greatly exaggerated. The fact that The Washington Post, the bastion of all things holy, wrote a piece how the hysteria arose from a educators workshop that featured a handful of YouTube videos of such challenges, most of which were 10 years old gives me security in my beliefs.

No doubt that there exists a handful of gullible jackasses who have actually done such things, but it’s likely this mindset doesn’t affect all teenagers. However, I’m more concerned with the gullibility of adults who Ate. This. Shit. Up., some of whom are news editors, is vastly alarming. These people vote

Aside from these hysterical pieces feeding into the stereotype of teenagers as imbeciles who can’t get their clothes on without falling down the stairs, the proliferation of this casts adults in a bad light. If they can’t see past fake news created by Russian troll farms, then just how good are their bullshit detectors?

I understand this is partially a generational difference, and likely a feeling of superiority. If the last year has taught us anything, we’re sort of through the looking glass on such assumptions of binary things.

 

You’re Making the World a Worse Place, Social Media

I mean this. Usually, I bury these lede with my headlines, try to put something pithy, a little witty. But I can’t in this case.

There’s a story that’s floated to the top of my newsfeed today, which has been picked up by the mainstream, about how the high school students affected by last Wednesday’s mass shooting were “Crisis Actors,” hired to give pretense to passing gun control laws.

This is beyond infuriating to me as a journalist because I tend to ebb to the belief that a person is as good as the news they receive daily, and some people need the most robust information possible because they’re beyond stupid.

In the past, Facebook at least partially recognizes this, through public shaming, and they implemented features, both human and not, designed to obstruct the flow of faulty information, whether by tin-foil hat wearers or the local Russian bot.

So imagine my shock when this morning when I followed a trail to one of these posts on Facebook that I couldn’t report such content because it was shared as a mixture of both photos and video content.

This is beyond absurd and infuriating that Facebook didn’t consider that the flow of information is probably being shared by such media. After all, they released such paid ads, all of which were graphics, to intelligence committees in Congress recently.

And Facebook isn’t alone in the blame. Last August when Donald Trump hosted a rally in my fair city of Phoenix, a dummy Twitter account, which was Russian in origin, shared an aerial shot supposedly of the Pro-Trump crowd versus the size of the protestors.

Locals knew better because the skyline and layout clearly didn’t match downtown Phoenix, but that didn’t matter because enough people saw this post before the account was flagged as a Russian bot (two months after the rally)!!!

And as it turns out, the President of the United States isn’t immune to resharing such dubious content.

Stop actively trying to make the world a worse place, social media. The world is already divisive enough and you are not helping matters.

What the river has done to this poor cracker’s land

An AP notification came over my iPhone on Friday that stated the State of Florida has ordered 5.6 million of its residents to evacuate before Hurrican Irma makes landfall.

5.6 Million People.

The next day, the Governor ordered another 400K people to leave.

In between this and Hurricane Harvey, I’ve pondered a lot recently how you’d decide what objects in your life you’d pack in the event a natural disaster directed itself in the path of your home.

This consideration of encapsulating your life into a single suitcase coincidentally comes at a point in my personal life where I’m planning for contingencies in my own. In the last month I’ve taken it upon myself to literally backup about 60 years worth of family photos currently situated in photo albums.

Part of my nature has always anticipated the worst case scenarios, but it’s difficult to imagine the existential dread when it’s fast approaching. I cannot imagine trading last looks at an abode you’ve called home for years or even decades before it’s hypothetically under water or memories become a pile of rubble when you return.

Before Hurricane Irma made landfall on Saturday, Vox posted a handy graphic of what Catagory 1-5 hurricanes would do to a home and surrounding palm trees. Such designations on what damage Category 1 versus 5 hurricanes would inflict are self-explanatory yet still nebulous. Even a Category 3, with 100 mile winds would leave a house mostly intact although significantly damaged. A Category 5 hurricane is strong enough to rip a palm from its roots. It’s likely akin to losing a loved one.

Somewhere in my mind, I recalled a thought experiment in Freshman year of high school when my theater teacher directed the class to consider what they’d carry with you in such a case. In my youthful ignorance, my answer was that I’d pack for survival rather than continuity.

Twelve years later and a mess of new memories later, it seems like a tone-deaf answer.

 

The Birth of an Idea

Most concepts we think up are nebulous in origin, three loosely connected thoughts and transitions linked by anmeaningful end result, if you’re lucky.

I had such a thought the other day I can still reconstruct that end idea. It wasn’t any idea that was life changing but I prefer to think that I walked away with an more accurate view of myself.

I like to cosplay, or costume play, and Phoenix hosts a comic convention every six months, Fan Fest and Phoenix Comic Con. Cosplay is basically dressing up as your favorite fictional characters. In the past, I’ve tended to eschew toward less obvious character to pantomime. People like those more, in my experience. Prior to last Friday, I had no inkling who I would cosplay in November.

During my break at work, I went to the public library near my work. As my car moved down the road, the following exchange popped in my head as I waited for the light to change, spurred by the awaiting smell of books and fine indoor cooling (libraries have the best cooling systems, they’re the just right of cool):

“You know, I think my favorite place to hang out would be is a library.”

(pause)

“It’s interesting that a lot of my favorite fictional characters are bookish, cerebral types. There’s a lot of me in those guys.”

*Mentally surveys the my favorite fictional characters/people I’ve cosplayed and if they had those characteristics I detailed.*

Eventually, I settle upon Rupert Giles, played by Anthony Head, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who was a librarian on the show. I’ve never cosplayed as him before but I mentally survey all the “costume,” any casual clothing I already own, which would complete the ensemble. A Donegal tweed jacket. An dress shirt from Jermyn Street (Giles would probably approve). I don’t have any particular slacks or loafers lined up but this can determined at a later date.

This is what cosplayers call a “closet cosplay,” where everything you need for a costume, give or take hair product or makeup, is already in your closet. When I decided to cosplay as Harold Finch, played by Michael Emerson, from Person of Interest last fall, it came together similarly.

A Buffy purist or two may want to take me to task for not being completely screen-accurate, but my general rule for cosplay is nailing the spirit, not so much an explicit recreation when I go out into the world as these people. Again, people appreciate the creativity and effort more.

So, in this minute and a half of my life I produced these thoughts, which will partially alter my experience at the convention this fall and hey, I know myself a little better after this.

Isn’t that cool?