The $353,000 dinner for two
Bernie Sanders is really poking the bear now. He’s begun hitting the Hollywood elite, those that are attempting to provide the final funding for his opponent’s less-than-thriving presidential campaign. (Be wary as you read ahead. Some of these luminaries may be your favorite tabloid stars.) Such hubris is liable to keep Bernie out of the Democrats' Gold Club for all time.
The Democrats desperately want Bernie out. Well, not the voters, but the operatives, the racketeers. It’s time, they say, for Hillary to begin focusing on Donald Trump in the seven-month-long match-up that everybody in Hollywood must be salivating over, but is giving the rest of us the trots. Bernie’s already been buried by the
Washington scriptwriters, but-- from his back, laying in a coffin-- he has won majorities, large ones, in five of the six most recent voting states, including all three racially-diverse states on Saturday-- Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. Now he’s laying rhetorical aim at George Clooney’s upcoming $353,000-per-couple fundraiser for Hillary, referring to it, as he did over the weekend, as “obscene.”
Come on, Bernie, lighten up. It's only politics as usual. The Clintons didn’t invent it, though they sure as hell glamorized it. What’s the point of having power if you can’t pal around with the world’s most robust and exciting image makers? Why have
elbows if they can’t be rubbed against people who employ full-time elbow polishers (probably)? Hollywood loves Hillary. They’ve given us “impressions” of the woman as portrayed by Emma Thompson, Tea Leoni, and Robin Wright-Penn in award-nominated roles. Who am I forgetting?
Her apologists, growing increasingly entitled and shrill as winter turns to spring, say the gala is actually a party fundraiser for “down ticket” races, but then it’s strange that
both of the party’s presidential candidates aren’t part of the event. Only one of the two has shown an astonishing propensity to raise money this year and it’s not Hillary. Will we at least get to read the transcripts of the speech she makes at the dinner? We haven’t seen the Goldman scripts yet, but this one could probably get punched up a little first by Bruce Vilanch. For a cool $325 grand, my ears would require dirty limericks and some sturdy investment tips.
When Clinton accepts extravagant sums of money from investment firms, pharmaceutical companies, and other corporate benefactors, she says she doesn’t consider these to be bribes. But then she would, wouldn’t she? It still has not been scientifically proven that the generous application of cash will grease any wheels in Washington D.C. Or has it? Have they done studies on that? I'm being sarcastic.
I know the Spielberg-Capshaws would like to muscle their way in between hosts at this fete, but it might be best for everybody if the Clooneys and Clintons are seated at the same table. Mrs. Clooney is a well-respected human rights attorney, we’re told, so maybe she could provide some enlightenment to Hillary (and Bill, too, if he's not too busy looking down her dress) in respect to the 2009 coup in Honduras, Israel’s policy in Palestine, and the career of Henry Kissinger, whom the Clintons vacation with as frequently as the Newharts do with the Rickleses. Clinton would certainly claim she already knows all there is to know about human rights, but then she would, wouldn’t she?
No flipping
Garry Shandling was possibly the most gifted comedic
talent of his generation, and that’s a generation that includes Robin
Williams, Steve Martin, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry
David. He was that good. His stand-up career was par excellence. It was
long-lasting, uniformly polished, and endlessly quotable. He can lay claim to two remarkable TV
shows that were specific to his voice-- It's Garry Shandling's Show, an early Showtime and Fox network absurdity that channeled George Burns and Gracie Allen, and The Larry Sanders Show, the HBO
masterpiece that is the greatest single-camera comedy series of all-time. Only Letterman and David can also claim two great series.
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A St. Louis radio and print journalist, Howard
Balzer, is claiming that the then-St. Louis Rams, owned by Stan Kroenke
and coached by Jeff Fisher (two men that have mustaches), only selected the openly-gay collegiate
player, Michael Sam, in the 2014 amateur draft after they had first secured a
deal with the NFL that the selection would protect them from being
featured in the HBO pro football reality series Hard Knocks. (We know for sure that the team nixed a plan Oprah Winfrey had to film a documentary at Sam's first training camp.) Sam was selected by St. Louis in the seventh and final round, the 249th pick in a 256-player draft. He was the first SEC Defensive Player of the Year in a decade not to be chosen in the NFL draft's first two rounds.
Fisher denies
the charge vehemently. "Who in their right mind would think that you give up a draft choice to avoid doing something like that?" he told reporters. But Sam, who was released during his first
preseason despite leading the team in sacks at the time, tweeted out that he
wouldn’t be surprised if the story were true. I'm just not sure, personally. I was
so excited when Sam was drafted by my favorite team. At the time, an
entity known as the St. Louis Rams still existed. The conspiracy
narrative that seems most likely to me is that Kroenke and Fisher agreed
to draft Sam if the city of St. Louis agreed to pay his salary.
Clubhouseschooling
When I was a boy, I would sometimes visit my father at work. My brother and I would get off the school bus in the small village of Newhall, Iowa, and ride our bikes from our grandparents' house over to the grain elevator, where he was the manager. At one point, he gave us each a shovel and we pushed around wet corn over the period of a few days and I lost a year off my life. That short-term shoveling assignment carries the distinction of being the only three or four times in my life to this date that I literally punched a time card. (Though, for the last ten years, I’ve done so on a computer.) “Pay Chris by the hour,” he used to say, “Pay Aaron by the job.” No, I made that part up. I think what he actually said was, “Stop crying.”
My father’s job was not as fun as Drake LaRoche’s father’s job. His
old job, I guess that would be. Adam LaRoche quit the Chicago White Sox baseball organization last week after the team’s vice president, Kenny Williams, reportedly told him that his teenage son was around the club too much. Not some of the time, mind you. Not a lot of the time. All the time.
It’s March. Shouldn’t Drake LaRoche be in school, you ask? There’s an easy explanation that you may have already guessed. The boy is home-schooled, or more accurately, "selectively schooled." Adam told this to the Washington Post three years ago when Drake was 11, "We're not big on school. I told my wife, 'He's going to learn a lot more useful information in the clubhouse than he will the classroom.'" The kid spent nearly all of last year traveling with the team, the first season LaRoche spent with the White Sox. The veteran first baseman, who hit a paltry .207 for the team in 2015, says that he signed with Chicago’s South Siders a year ago exactly because management told him his son could be a constant presence in the locker room. That was the basic agreement with LaRoche's previous club, the Washington Nationals.
It’s all very bizarre. Bizarre because one of LaRoche’s teammates, outfielder Adam Eaton, has now referred to the 14-year-old kid as “a great leader.” Huh? If that's true, that team desperately needs a Molina brother. All-Star pitcher Chris Sale has been the most publicly-supportive of his former teammate. He made the statement to the media that “the wrong guy left,” a slap at Williams, and then reportedly kicked the executive out of a team meeting after berating him in front of the other players. This behavior is shocking in its audacity. Williams is Sale’s boss. Granted, Sale has more good will built up by his on-field performance than LaRoche, and Williams probably makes less money than does his star pitcher. Doubly interesting it is because Williams is one of the very few African-Americans serving in the front office of a Major League Baseball club currently. The paucity of such has been a major scandal in the sport for decades. The three players listed earlier in this paragraph are all white.
Williams' less-than-regal reputation is a peculiarity to me. When Yale-educated Theo Epstein, grandchild of a Hollywood screenwriter, constructed the team that broke the Boston Red Sox’ 86-year championship drought in 2004, he was immediately declared a genius and commentators suggested the inevitability of his Hall-of-Fame induction even before he had reached the age of 40. When Williams, a former Major League player educated at Stanford, constructed the team that broke the Chicago White Sox’
88-year championship drought in 2005, America yawned. A decade later, promoted to vice president within the same front office, Williams’ employees feel the personal security to make shady comments about him to the media and dress him down in front of each other. Few others have brought race into this story. Now I have. Race, where a distinction can be identified, is always a factor. Let's not pretend that white millionaires are comfortable having black men tell them what to do. LaRoche chose to quit rather than to do so.
The supposed promise by the team is, at this point, a ‘he said, he said.’ The Players Association says it is “monitoring the situation.” LaRoche claims it's written on paper. If it is, why isn't he staying on to fight? If the White Sox truly did tell LaRoche that his son could be around all the time, my guess it that it's not written down, at least the part about it being
all the time. If LaRoche’s boss lied to him, then I have only this to say to him: Welcome to America. Perhaps the original arrangement became suddenly-- or gradually-- untenable. If the boy spent the entirety of last year in the White Sox clubhouse (one in which he was issued a full uniform by the club bearing his name and his father’s number), then obviously that might have been the tacit agreement, but there must have been complaints. I would have complained. When my colleagues bring their newborns into the office, my first comment is always “let’s see the visitor's security badge.”
LaRoche’s pals were quick to come to his side. Those that would have opposed the presence of a teenager in such a reputedly crass environment, and those that likely would have complained to the front office, are not going to be quick to claim credit. (Jimmy Rollins, anyone?) A good boss takes the heat for everybody else, and I strongly suspect that’s what Williams is doing.
Baseball’s controversies just keep getting sillier. This one, in fact, might be the most “baseball”-like dust-up to date. It’s a multi-billion dollar business that possesses the most remarkable innocence fetish. The real world seems to be lining up almost universally behind the team on this issue, and we should be comforted by that fact. It turns out that nobody else’s job allows an employee’s child to be underfoot 100% of the time. LaRoche giving back $13 million by walking away is a great financial deal for the club and its fans. It was a bit much to pay for one season of a .207 hitter, even if he is Super Dad. The cancellation of so much salary is what makes the story such click-bait on the internet. As sportscaster Bomani Jones said yesterday on the radio, “Drake LaRoche’s dad is different than my dad.” Will Leitch drew notice to the distinction that Adam's not hanging out with his son in the clubhouse, he's
raising him there.
Adam LaRoche has proven himself now to be a different breed of man. No doubt about it. During the offseason, he pals around with the Robertsons of
Duck Dynasty fame. A couple years ago he started growing out a beard that would now allow him to fit in at their family picnics. He's adamant about teaching his child about "the real world," yet thinks that gets accomplished by keeping him away from school and the presence of his peers. (Curiously, Drake's older sister, Montana,
does get to go to school.) He has clearly succeeded in teaching his son a string of life lessons during this spring training season of 2016. One of them is certainly a good one: there are more important things on this earth than money. Another, though, is that, if you don't get preferential treatment, you quit. And still a third is that, you're a celebrity now, boy. We can only hope that one more lesson picked up by both father and son is that workplaces, especially locker rooms, are not day care facilities. Even in schools, teachers have an area where the kids are not allowed, and even in
Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner goes to sit in the bleachers, not on the bench, when his father takes the field with the White Sox legends.
Cinderellas and the real winners
One of the local five-- the University of Northern Iowa Panthers-- have played the role of Cinderella in the NCAA Tournament this year, but the team came to a crashing and historic thud last night in the round of 32. The 11th seed team from the Midwest's Missouri Valley Conference blew a 12-point lead during the final 44 seconds of regulation, a feat that staggers the imagination and marks the worst collapse, not only in the history of the NCAA tournament, but in the 123-year history of college basketball.
There's a lot of sadness going around locally today on behalf of "the kids," but I'm not having it. Number one, the players are not kids. If I hear that phrase one more time to describe grown adults that entertain us for free and make other less-talented men extraordinarily wealthy, I'm going to commit a charging foul of my own. Number two, here's the book on the Panthers. They were in that particular marquee game only because they, first, won their conference tournament with a buzzer-beating 18-foot shot that bounced off the back of the rim. Then they beat Texas in the first round of the tournament on another buzzer-beater, this one a half-court bank shot. When the Panthers blew their lead Sunday night, they then banked in another three-point shot in the opening seconds of overtime. By then, I had seen enough. The team, I decided, had gone as far as I wished to see them go. They're a distraction to the Iowa State Cyclones.
What is our fascination with Cinderellas anyway? It's all explained in the name, I guess. They're fairy tale stories. But they're not for me. I root for excellence. An upset in the first round only deprives us of better basketball in the later rounds. Everybody but the Spartans fans loved to see Middle Tennessee State knock off Michigan State Friday afternoon in what may have been the greatest first-round tournament upset ever, but the result of that game, by extension, means we have a mediocre Syracuse team cruising into the Sweet 16.
UNI head coach Ben Jacobson should have taken 100% responsibility for a strategy that had the team inbounding the ball repeatedly into the corner. This led to four UNI turnovers in just 29 seconds. (Iowa State had
six turnovers during their entire second round game Saturday.) Jacobson can't shoulder the full blame for the cameras because it would be bad for the Northern Iowa program if he did. He "loves" these guys, but he'll be there a while and the principal players will each be gone right away or very soon. He has a ten-year deal that pays him an average of $900,000 annually through the 2024-25 season, double the market rate or more since it gets sucked away from the people that would actually be making the most money based on their skill and hard work. It's better for recruiting if the players take the heat on this. I haven't heard a single commentator blame the coach. But yikes, if you are the coach, how does something like that happen?
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I heard an ad on ESPN Radio today, voiced by one of the conglomerate's best known personalities, for
Werner Podiums. That manufacturing company is-- did you know?-- the official
ladder this year of celebratory net-cutting at the NCAA Tournament. The money is coming from virtually
everywhere! The money is almost
attacking the NCAA. The Atlantic Coast Conference, which put six of its 15-member teams into the round of 16, will make $30 million just from a pool set up by the NCAA for conference payouts. CBS and Turner are in the middle of a 14-year, $10.8 billion television contract that pays the
non-profit NCAA a $740 million rights fee for 2016. The players get nada.
Blame It on the Boogie
Steve Knopper of Rolling Stone has written a book entitled “The Genius of Michael Jackson.” It’s extraordinary to think of what the world of music and entertainment was before Michael. When the film
The Wiz was released in 1977, movie distribution was still remarkably segregated. Theater chains in white neighborhoods wouldn’t play the picture.
Except for Motown and disco, radio stations were still almost exclusively either black or white, with black records promoted only to black radio stations. DJ Steve Dahl’s disco demolition riot at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979 had not only done in disco, but also, incidentally, the ability for black musical artists to cross over to white radio. The topic is probably as little-explored today as it was then, but in 1982, two years into Reagan, and a year before MJ’s “Thriller” album upended the world, only two singles by African-Americans cracked Billboard’s top ten the entire calendar year-- “Truly,” by Lionel Richie, and “Ebony and Ivory,” which of course is actually a duet between a black man and a white one, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. Back in the disco-crazy year of ’79, 40 percent of songs to reach the top three were by African-Americans. Michael’s “Off the Wall” that year put four songs in the top ten. By this examination of the time between “Wall” and “Thriller,” Jackson almost single-handedly kept radio integrated, and then of course, he became the primary cause of music video production exploding in the years that followed.
Chris Rock has said that he sees the entirety of black history in Hollywood as the time
before the Jackson 5 and the time a
fter. He jokes that he won’t appear in a movie set prior to the Jackson brothers’ emergence.
My favorite anecdote from Knopper’s book: As the Jacksons were recording the song “Blame It on the Boogie,” Michael flings off his headphones and runs abruptly out of the studio. His producer fears that a blast of volume has come through the phones. In the hallway, Michael is dancing. “I have to get this out of my system. I can’t hold still and sing.”
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Des Moines is the center of it this weekend. Iowa State, Northern Iowa, and Iowa are all in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, competing in far-off states, but for the first time, the city plays host to a regional of the tournament, and what a draw of teams they have been given-- Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Connecticut, to name four of eight. Those four schools each have at least three national championships, and between them, they have 20. Tickets for one of the sessions (two games only) is running more than $350, and that’s on the sticker, not the scalping price. None of the total money taken in for any of the games, and it will run into the tens of millions, will go to the players.
The Trumps and the Clintons, BFFs
Politico has
a scoop-- gal pals Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton both wore Vera Wang when they married their respective Prince Hedge Fund Managers. Did you know that? Separate ceremonies, though, I think. They're not besties, associates say, because they only have dinner together "a few times a year." They're not the type of friends "who text each other all day."
I'm not sure I believe it. I think Chelsea should release a record of her emoticons.
The truly amazing part is that all of America can agree that one of these women's parents is our great savior, and one of the other's is the end of the world as we know it.
America, this is the race you demanded. And I can see the sun on the horizon.
A little conspiracy theory for ya
Hear me out: Is the major anti-Trump campaign being waged this week by the establishment news media really an orchestrated anti-Sanders campaign?
In the week leading up to Michigan and Ohio, we have been bombarded with stories about the efforts to stop Donald Trump-- the 2012 loser, Mitt Romney, speaking out (of all people, calling Trump a phony), "the Republican national security community" speaking out, the push for Rubio to bow out. The Republican race has led the headlines all week.
But, in the background, something else was happening. According to FAIR and Alternet, the Washington Post ran
16 negative stories about Bernie Sanders in just one day.They weren't front and center. That space was reserved for the end of the world as we know it, Mr. Trump, but as I said in my February 28th post, the dirty work gets done when nobody's looking, when no one suspects it.
Bernie Sanders is the actual threat to business as usual-- the only candidate that challenges the concept of American empire. Trump hasn't said anything outrageous in nearly two weeks. He's already softening to the establishment. Ted Cruz is clearly
the more terrifying Republican. Trump might be Hitler on the stump, but Cruz is Richard Nixon in thought, word, and deed.
Following Super Tuesday, the Washington media declared it over for Sanders, but without ever explaining for us the concept of a superdelegate. We haven't heard the word in weeks. (For what it's worth, Blogger's spellcheck still doesn't recognize it.) There has been almost no examination of how the party actually counts votes. The first-priority plot now of the establishment, I contend, is to secure an actual majority-vote victory for Clinton. It's not enough for her to claim the delegate one the DNC engineered for her through a lack of televised debates and caucus hijinks. It can't be obvious to general election voters that the primaries were a sham. Clinton has a real problem unfolding for herself in November and they know that.
Over the weekend, we were told that Clinton was "gearing up for Turmp" even as Sanders was taking three out of four primary states. Wins, yes, but "the road is about to get rougher" for the upstart socialist even though the only states thus far to have voted outside Clinton's stronghold of Dixie had mostly gone to him, and the approaching delegate-rich states of Michigan and Ohio were tailor-made for Sanders' anti-Wall Street message and his attacks on U.S. trade policy. During the debate in Flint, Michigan, the only take-away anybody in the tradition media seemed to have was that Sanders insulted all of womanhood by verbally reprimanding Clinton once for interrupting him. The polls in Michigan, they told us, had Ms. Clinton up on her opponent anywhere from 11 to 37 points. The Huffington Post Pollster, a measure of all public polling combined, had her by 18.
And then last night happened.
Sanders WINS Michigan.
It couldn't have been last-minute vote changing. The facts don't allow for it. It was too much in too short a window of time. The polling was wrong all along. Why is the news media still clinging to a series of expectations that have been upended at every turn this year? Uncomfortable realities of the real America have been suppressed for some time for fear of what they mean for the people that live in Washington. In this year's race, they keep rearing their ugly heads, and the careerists are jittery as hell.
The new spin has already begun. (Of course, the Clintons made the art of political lying-- "spinning"-- into a glamorous profession. Think back to the era of Carville vs. Matalin, and Michael J. Fox as George Stephanopoulos.) I'm reading the new hook here in the wee small hours. Clinton voters thought she already had it sewn up (even though Sanders has vowed to stay in the race until all the states and districts have voted). They crossed over to vote against Trump instead.
The game is rigged, and the Super PACs and the national committee have the nomination in the bag for Clinton, Incorporated, but the outcome in Michigan shows how bad off Clinton's game is. It's getting harder and harder for her machine to hide it. Look for at least 20 negative Bernie stories on the Post's website on Thursday.
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Bonus early-morning blogging fact. I found this one when I was looking up how to spell 'Stephanopoulos': Did you know the host of ABC's
Good Morning America and
This Week gave the Clintons, his former bosses responsible for his entire career, $75,000 over three years from 2012 to 2014? The story is from 10 months ago on CNN, but I'm just finding it now. Don't worry about the potential for impartiality on his part, however. He settled the entire affair, after it was uncovered, by recusing himself from a Republican Debate on ABC last month.
Political trade secrets
Perhaps you're aware of
this story from a decade ago, but probably not because everybody involved made a concerted effort to keep it quiet: Rogue employees at the Coca-Cola Company were turned in by the executives at PepsiCo after attempting to sell the rival company vital secrets about the operations at Coke. The authors at Freakonomics (linked above) suggested a few days after that event that Pepsi might be as interested in keeping the super secret recipe for Coke out of the hands of the public as Coke is...
That would be a lot like what happens to prescription drugs when they go off patent and generic drug companies come in. The impact would be that the price of real Coke would fall a lot (probably not all the way to the price of the generic Coke knockoffs). This would clearly be terrible for Coke. It would probably also be bad for Pepsi. With Coke now much cheaper, people would switch from Pepsi to Coke. Pepsi profits would likely fall.
Since Ralph Nader, in his 2004 book "The Good Fight," famously linked the consumer choice between Democrats and Republicans to the one between Coke and Pepsi, it stirred me to ponder how this year's presence of Donald Trump in the presidential race is like that example of corporate espionage among soda makers ten years ago. What bothers the establishment, in this case, about Trump is his manners. It's not his politics, or even his rhetoric. Those are right in line with those of the Republicans that oppose him...
Ben Carson didn't say we needed to build a wall to keep Mexicans out. No, instead he suggested we use drones to bomb the areas of the Southwestern desert where migrants are known to cross without sanction. (Maybe his political mistake was in failing to call on the Mexican government to pay for the drone strikes.) Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio also support the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, even against the criticism of the plan by Pope Francis.
Rubio and Cruz don't support a stoppage of immigration to the U.S. for all Muslims, as Trump does. What Rubio favors instead is a halt to immigration "from that part of the world." Ted Cruz has suggested that President Obama's defense of Muslims in general is a defense of terrorism. They spend the first two hours of each televised debate talking about how immigration is ruining the country. Then, in each of their closing remarks, always mention how their parents came to the country years ago, without understanding English, and wound up making a magical life here for themselves and their children.
Trump says there's nothing wrong with torture, indeed, he says we don't do enough of it. But the establishment candidates, Rubio and Cruz, also refuse to rule out traditional torture techniques as part of their campaign's proposed policies on national security. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have implemented torture. In 2009, Gen. Barry McCaffrey admitted that our intelligence services have tortured Muslims to the point of murdering dozens of them. We're still waiting for the public release of the videos that show the worst offenses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. There are pictures still under federal protection that show American soldiers raping children.
Trump caused major angst by saying we need to go after the family members of terrorists. Obama actually does that. When the sixteen-year-old son of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike
two weeks after the same thing happened to his father, in Yemen in 2011, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the boy should have "had a more responsible father."
See what I'm getting at? Washington's beef with Trump is only that his bluntness is bad for the brand. The torture and bombing topics are shit they talk about only in secret, or within the protective cocoon of a White House press briefing, yet here he is out in Sioux City and Macon blabbing it in front of the church folk. Does the establishment media and political apparatus not think we know about any of this stuff? Do they really wonder why Trump's speeches, while poisonous and repellent to many, don't cause blanching on behalf of the portion of the electorate that's scared to the point of bowel discharge by the threat of terrorism?
It was absolutely comical to see a group of 90 Washington careerists, calling themselves "members of the Republican national security community," come out with guns blazing against Trump this past week, releasing a statement of condemnation against the Republican front-runner. In this paper, we have the bizarre spectacle of seeing them criticize the "embrace of the expansive use of torture"? Signee Robert Blackwill, former National Security Adviser, said of torture in 2005, "I would never say never." Signee Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security, signed another paper once, one that authorized waterboarding.
Trump is a "corporate espionage-style" threat to these guys. He's repeatedly bashed their former boss, George W. Bush, on the campaign stump, routinely calling him an awful president. On stage in February, he even brought up the third-rail issue of the 9/11 Commission, referring subtly to the 28 redacted pages of the commission's report. "Elect me," he promised, "and we'll find out who really knocked down the towers. You may find it's the Saudis."
Protecting a brand means protecting secrets. Coke and Pepsi know this. Democrats and Republicans know it. Donald Trump seems to understand it intuitively. It's more than okay for a Republican administration to implement illegal, immoral, and anti-American policies. It's definitely okay for a Democratic administration to then immunize those Republicans from accountability with bipartisan political support for the same, and an offer of legal protection from prosecution. But for Christ's sake, don't talk about it. And stop shouting it.
Hollywood and politics
I watched the Oscars on Sunday. Chris Rock brought an immediacy to the proceedings that may have had an unintended consequence for the Academy. He made the movies largely seem irrelevant. Rock’s assignment to the role of host this year became a matter of perfect timing after the voters, for the second straight year, shut out all men and women of color from the 20 acting nominations. There was no other story line entering this year’s pageant. Well, okay, there was Leonardo DiCaprio, and Rocky, but beyond that, it was just a party with a bunch of white people.
Movies, generally-speaking, are not imaginative today. The studios give us nothing but sequels and re-makes-- "re-imaginings," they like to say. It’s a result of the corporate mentality at work-- only products that worked once before, and that minimize risk. (
"Look at this line graph that shows how successful a remake of 'Man From U.N.C.L.E' would be.") Art becomes incidental. Specificity is a money loser. The independent spirits have bolted for television, where (mostly) cable executives are begging for fresh ideas. (Original content translates to original ideas.) The cinema is losing out to the fiction that's playing on television, and
really losing out to
non-fiction that's playing out on television.
Social and political unrest in the country is on the grow again, at last, and the stories and characters getting play from movie financiers are not part of it. That was the subtle jab behind each one of Rock’s jokes Sunday. When we actually get a movie that overlaps the headlines and is capable of electrifying, it gets too limited a distribution and virtually no notice.
Straight Outta Compton is an example. 2013’s
Fruitvale Station is a better one. The first collaborative effort between Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan (prior to this year's
Creed) is so far out of Hollywood’s mainstream that you don't even hear the people boycotting the Oscars make reference to it. The industry still attempts to bowl us over with escapism, and there’s certainly an enormous audience for that (mostly a white one-- "escapism" being a bit of a white privilege), but then when you put on your big annual party, and you want it to seem relevant, none of the voters have seen it, and you got nothing.
The most jarring juxtaposition between Hollywood and the real world on the ABC telecast was the moment immediately following Rock’s bracing, singularly-focused monologue. Charlize Theron and another white lady came out in their extravagant gowns. Even before they opened their mouths to speak, the picture on the screen-- and the music-- had transported us back to traditional Hollywood, the glamour and elegance, an unintentional reminder of how difficult it must be for people who live lives such as this to know what’s going on anywhere else. Rock's basically done for the evening. Now back to the usual dinner. On Howard Stern yesterday, Tina Fey referred to her experience in attendance Sunday as "some real Hollywood bullshit."
Stand-up comics-- the great ones (and Rock is the best one living)-- speak truth. And Hollywood specializes in fantasy. There’s a reason that movie producers have struggled to know what to do with Pryor, Carlin, Rock. What
they do best is exactly the opposite of acting. And it's little wonder that there’s a faction in the Academy that thinks their biggest event is better served by hosts such as Neil Patrick Harris, whom Rock name-checked, Hugh Jackman, James Franco, and/or Anne Hathaway.
Let's give 'em a show, reinforce the idea that our business is obsessed with dress-up, and guys and gals, lets limit the hard stuff to Best Documentary- Feature. An evening with Rock front and center is bound to be another event all-together, and this year, the Academy was incredibly fortunate they had him to add substance to what is normally a very hollow proceeding. Good night, Brooklyn!
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Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan on steroids. It’s the celebrity, the long-crafted image, the paternalism, but mostly, it’s the childish optimism. Trump pushes people’s fear buttons, no doubt-- the enemy is landing at the gate-- as it was for Reagan with his anti-Communism, Southern Strategy, and “law and order” Nixon-ism. But the more important similarity is this “Make America Great Again” hook of Trump's-- pessimism playing the role of freedom's most dangerous opponent, doubt as weakness. The facts don’t matter, nor the details. Optimism can be the solution itself. Just believe.
People will be remembered for what they say and what they represent, not what they do-- that's Reagan too. Blur that distinction between appearance and reality. Reagan developed it first on the big screen. Trump on the smaller one. “I’m very rich... I know smart people”-- that’s not radically different from what Reagan gave us in movie-speak, a simpler world, one that fits in this square up here. They each came from their own bizarre professional world, unhinged as they are from reality. “The Gipper's" world was one in which mogul Jack Warner, when asked about his handsome actor’s presidential aspirations, once replied, presumably tongue-in-cheek, “Nope.
Jimmy Stewart as president. Reagan as the best friend.”
This is Reagan’s Republican Party today. (Actually, the Democratic Party too.) You know this. They genuflect upon his visage, and Trump, despite what you've read recently, is not out of that new mainstream in the slightest. In fact, he has essentially reanimated the old man. "The City on the Hill" now just has a big wall around it and people wearing tacky red baseball-style caps with cheap lettering.
The only important difference between the two men may be surface. With Reagan, there was no calculation. He was thought by those close to him to be incapable of it. But Trump is clearly engaged in it. What has been “off the record” for Trump to this point is still an unknown, but until we get a full glimpse of it, either through third-party leak, major misstep, or both, the show is one we've actually seen. If you'll allow, call it a “double feature.”
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Let's check the logic on this. Obama has a Supreme Court position to fill, and the longer he waits, the harder it is to make the case that it's his call to make. So their argument goes: choose a moderate as your nominee, one perhaps that rather recently was confirmed overwhelmingly, because then it will be harder for the Republicans to politicize it.
I'd love to get this team of experts into a game of three-card Monte. Theirs is a fantastic glimpse into how a small mind works. You do that and you end up with what? A
moderate. How about this instead? It is largely agreed upon by everybody that's answered a poll on this that it's both the current president's choice to make,
and Republican lawmakers stepped into the manure pile by saying so loudly and publicly that they would oppose Obama's court nominee
regardless of who it is. So instead, if you're the president, why wouldn't you name the most bleeding-heart liberal justice you can think of as your choice? Because then, when the Republicans inevitably oppose him or her, you can easily make the public case that their objection is only political. This is like the other team kicking the ball around, giving you two extra outs, and then you fail to score. We know this bunch rarely puts their heart into anything, but frequently their brains also go home to get a fresh set of clothes (Ben Carson reference).
Or maybe it's that they wouldn't be all that motivated to put a true liberal on the court even if they had a clear path to it. Could be that. Why don't their supporters ever tell
Republicans they have to compromise?
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Hillary's vulnerability in the General Election is striking. She has only won two states so far outside of the South-- Massachusetts 50% to 49%, and Iowa (kind of) by
about 1% (who knows how the hell they count). Down went New Hampshire, Vermont, Colorado, Minnesota, even Oklahoma. Does she really think she's going to beat Trump in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee? Could she even win Arkansas?
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Take the online pledge to to write-in Bernie Sanders in November, or to support the Green Party candidate.
#BernieorBust
50,000 others have already done it, and that was before it hit Huffington Post.
