Month: October 2022

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A deranged man attacks Paul Pelosi with a hammer and Donald Trump Jr. thinks it is so funny that he suggests a perfect Halloween costume — a pair of men’s underwear and a hammer. I don’t know why so many conservatives are getting this wrong. This would have been a perfect time for Junior to say something like “we condemn all violent acts and wish Mr. Pelosi the best of health.” This would have been particularly advantageous because it would shown that at least one of the Trumps can take the high road. It would have countered some of the criticism that his father is receiving for encouraging political violence.

Instead Junior decided to rub it in. Why? There is absolutely nothing to be gained by being a dick in this situation and some advantage to being kind. The people who like Trump are going to still like him. The people who hate Trump are going to still hate Trump. But, for those few people who still haven’t made up their mind regarding Trump, it would be a chance to show some grace. Give the Trumps a different look. But, no, Junior couldn’t pass up a good joke.

And please don’t give me that the Democrats are just as bad. I disagree but for the sake of argument let’s say it is true. So what? Do you really want to defend yourself with a child’s tally of the bad behavior from your political opponents and say until our bad behavior tallies with the Democrats bad behavior tallies, we are going to act like a bunch of dicks? Wouldn’t your prefer to look better than them? I guess not.

For some reason, some Republicans think that Democrats are going to use this attack to their advantage. The Democrats might try but I really, and I am speaking as a Democrat here, can’t see how. Yes, there have been some comment about political violence but this is just a continuation of what they have been saying throughout the campaign. Also there have been some pretty smart Republicans who have condemned the attack while also pointing out the problem of urban violence. The rich aren’t even safe. Again, I disagree and thought they might have waited a few days to voice their concerns but it is kind to Mr. Pelosi and still driving home a legitimate political point. I don’t think anyone would have given the attack on Pelosi a second thought until a bunch of dicks started conspiracy theories and jokes. Now all bets are off.

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When last I was talking about Paul Pelosi, Greg Kelly, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, speculated that Nancy Pelosi had someone attack her husband with a hammer to gain sympathy for the Democrats in the upcoming election. I am happy to say they have moved on. To another conspiracy theory. This conspiracy theory carried a little more heft as it was passed on by one of the richest men on earth — Elon Musk. This theory has Paul Pelosi galavanting at gay bars (he lives in San Francisco for Christ’s sake), and we all know Paul is a bit of a drinker (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), bringing home a hustler (more winks, more nudges) and later is attacked by said hustler.

What to say. First that one of the most powerful men on earth would choose to pass on unsubstantiated speculation speaks poorly of Musk. Given that he is about to take over Twitter with its huge social network, and that there is already criticism about how Musk might handle such power, now would have been an excellent time for him to show some restraint. Instead, he threw himself into spreading speculation without giving it a second thought. At this point, there is no evidence that Paul Pelosi was at a gay bar nor that his attacker was a hustler. What responsible person would pass on this unsubstantiated gossip? Apparently, Elon Musk.

Then, in this situation at least, Paul Pelosi is a victim of a crime. Even if it turns out that Musk’s gossip proves to be true, none of it matters, because someone hit Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer. Nobody deserves that. Not if the person is gay, not if the person was hiring a hustler. Musk, very slyly, is blaming Pelosi for being attacked. Forget the hammer, why was he in a gay bar with a hustler. Neither of which is known to be true.

Contrary to current thinking, passing on gossip as truth is not some innocent act. Just because you hear information, doesn’t mean you need to pass it on. Now, if Musk was some neighborhood biddy passing along gossip, it would be bad enough, but he is, and he know he is, a very visible person. A lot of people listen to what he has to say. For him, to pass on gossip is unforgivable. He is clearly trying to undermine Nancy and Paul Pelosi. Why?

Right now all we know is that Pelosi was attacked and in the hospital. If people want to say anything, it should be to wish him a quick recovery. If you hate the Pelosi’s so much, and you can’t bring yourself to wish him well, then just keep your mouth shut. You aren’t required to say anything. Musk should try it more often. It would add to his mystery and certainly enhance his reputation more than the things he says.

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Greg Kelly, Newsmax Host, speculates that Nancy Pelosi might have had her own husband attacked. Kelly deleted this speculation later but not before it was seen and copied. Yes, he thinks that woman who has been married to a man for close to 60 years would arrange for a man to attack her 82 year old husband in order to win an election campaign. This is the state of American politics.

It is sad that not even for one very brief moment that Kelly could not just keep his mouth shut. And that is the best response when dealing with awkward questions about people you may not like. He doesn’t have to wish her and her husband well as they go through this unhappy event. He could have followed the old adage of if he couldn’t say something nice, he could have just said nothing. That would have been fine.

Instead he decided to behave badly. He raised his eyebrows suspiciously for everyone to see and speculated how this hammer attack is happening so close to the end of a hard fought election, could Nancy Pelosi have initiated this attack in order to gain sympathy for the Democrats. I realize that Kelly’s fallback position is if Nancy Pelosi is involved there must be some conspiracy going on. But his quick draw reaction was so premature, unnecessary and cruel. It just happened, couldn’t he wait a day or two, before connecting the dots which lead to conspiracy. In a few days, the cops will know more, more will be known about the attacker and, then, and only then, can he draw the lines connecting this attack to some Nancy Pelosi conspiracy or another.

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One of the more pernicious bromides that infects American life is the idea that you can do anything you want, be anything you want. You just have to be willing to put the time and effort into it. Of course, there is some truth to it. Yes, some people are lucky enough to achieve their dream but not terribly many and some start with hidden advantages that makes their journey to success a bit less bumpy.

The American ethos is built around the stories of the very few winners in the race and not the millions who struggle on the less glamorous sidelines. But we know it in our hearts. Millions of people will not be Super Bowl Quarterbacks. Millions of people will not be Rock Stars. Millions of people will not be President. Millions of people will not become billionaires. An overwhelming number of Americans will lead regular lives with regular incomes no matter how hard they try to be something else.

Yet, we still hold to this idea that you can do and be anything you want. It’s unhealthy and it is cleverly couched in language that conveniently blames the individual for not fulfilling his dream. There is always that if you willing to put the time and effort into it part of the equation that makes this idea impossible to refute. Obviously, it’s not the system that failed, it’s you. You just didn’t put enough effort into it, did you?

Yes there are people who beat the odds. We love to hear their inspirational stories hence the mind numbing blather about Olympic athletes overcoming impossible odds to follow their dreams. On the other hand, you don’t hear the stories of all those athletes who fought impossible odds and didn’t make to the Olympics. Obviously, there are more of these stories than the success stories but these stories don’t get heard. We only want stories that reveal something great about America. The problem is that these failure stories are telling an important American story. Everybody doesn’t make it to the top. Most people don’t. It could be lack of money. It could be bad breaks. It could be the slightest lack of talent. She sings well but there are other singers just the slightest bit better. Or how does five foot tall basketball player get into NBA?

People have to be realistic. That doesn’t somehow fit into the idea as presented. You can be anything you want to be. How is this a good idea to pass onto children? Telling children to have big dreams, go for it and then when they fail, letting them think it’s their fault for failing. Because they will, because there is always that second part of the idea, if you try hard enough. Yes, let’s be realistic, but not too realistic because we wouldn’t want to discourage young people from beating their heads against the wall trying to be something they didn’t have a chance in Hell of becoming.

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Business managers are complaining about how people won’t work like they used to in the good old days. As the linked Los Angeles times article points out, this is a complaint as old as the Republic. The problem isn’t the workers, it is the wages.

I once worked at a call center. I supervised workers who made hotel reservations and they, on a busy day, may receive 20 or more calls in an hour. Having performed the job as an employee, I can assure you it was boring job full of mindless tasks. It did pay the bills. Barely. Call center operators are taking calls pretty much the whole time they are on the clock. This is the way companies want it. They want just enough operators to make sure that they only lose a small percentage of incoming calls. That’s right, they would rather their employees are always working than all of their customers get served.

The call center’s biggest problem was employee turnover. Because the pay was low and there was rarely any employee commitment to do anything other than an all right job, and, if they lost their jobs that could easily replace this job with one making the same wage, people quit or lost their job on a fairly regular basis. This meant that management generally was in a hiring and training mode most of the time.

Sometimes, the Uppity Ups would wonder why we couldn’t slow employee turnover. I’m sure my bosses, who were all a pretty smart lot and knew the answer to the problem, would suggests more money for labor. It was a dance that everyone knew had to be danced but that never really changed anything. Because more money for lower level employees is always off the table. The Uppity Ups received the truth and then acted as if it was never proposed. More money for lower level employees is a budget buster. Strangely, more money for higher level employees is not.

The Uppity Ups that counter the idea that more money will make lower level employees happier in their job. They have read some article in a business management magazine which site scientific studies that say people don’t just work for money. Money isn’t even one of the top reason that people work. Try to work on these other non-money reasons to bring down worker turnover because these studies prove that more money isn’t the answer. Employees want recognition, they want challenges, they want better jobs, and then they want money. So we would go off and see how we could improve those other areas.

We found that we were just as restricted in improving employees work life in those other areas as we were in more money. We needed employees on the phones not at the better jobs. This being the fact. We had significantly more entry level jobs than upper level jobs. Once anyone managed to get one of the upper level jobs, they stayed forever. So these better jobs rarely became available and just as a side note that me be obvious but I feel compelled to mention, a better job meant more money. The reason many people go for better jobs is they get more money. Regardless, this option was off the table as well.

Challenges. The job was answering the phone and booking hotel reservations. Almost every call was exactly the same. Different cities, different dates, maybe but there were no challenges except getting the customer off the line quickly and making no mistakes. The company already had a negative incentive on those two tasks — if you failed to meet standards after a three month period, you were fired. There was no challenge we could add to the job and there was no incentive in doing either task much better than you were. There, also, was an amazing disincentive to getting better at either task. If you worked faster, you made more mistakes. Which could put you on warning. If you made less mistakes, you talked too long. This too would put you on warning. Once you found the right balance, you maintained it. All management was left with was recognition and there are only so many pats on the backs a person can take before it looses its effectiveness.

In reality, all we could do was give them recognition. Everything else was off the table. Recognizing good work without spending a dime. More money isn’t the answer says the uppity ups. But it is and they know it is because this, of course, is their defense of the income imbalance between the top wage earners and the bottom. You have to pay top management top salaries in order to interest them and keep them in the job. Why doesn’t that same philosophy work for lower wage workers?

But I never stopped believing that if low level employees got more money for their jobs and, because they received more money, these jobs might be something they value and would want to keep, that there would be less employee turnover. The Uppity Ups refuse to believe this. They just can’t believe that people don’t value the crap wages they are paid. Herein lies the problem.

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If you want to know why elections get so ugly, it is because undecided voters are so difficult to read. It could be almost anything. Hair color, a divorce, being sick, driving cross country with the dog on the roof of car, an affair, and a long list of wrong doings that rarely have anything to do with the national interest.

I get why Republicans are staying with their less than stellar candidates. If they were Democrats I would do exactly the same thing. If Hershel Walker was a Democrat and he was running against Ted Cruz, I would vote for Hershel Walker. It makes more sense to me to vote the party and not the person.

I can’t quite understand people who vote for the person and not the party. It may have made sense fifty years ago when independent thinking people could get elected to congress and would occasionally vote differently than the majority of their party. However, in these polarized times, why would I vote a person. An individual in Congress has little chance to affect policy or law making. Independent thinkers are so rare as to be extinct. If an individual is a member of the majority party, they have a slight chance to get something done. If an individual is in the minority, it is pretty much hopeless. Republicans have their agenda and Democrats have their agenda and never the twain will meet. This means I vote for the better party and not the better person.

Which brings me to the undecided voter, first, how can anyone be undecided at this point in an election. It boggles the mind. The Democrat position and the Republican position are so starkly different that I find it very difficult to believe that there are people are still dithering over who they will vote for. I can accept that you may be a Republican but an undecided voter. How can this be?

This is also, of course, why Hershel Walker’s craziness and John Fetterman’s health are important. Apparently, these are the considerations that guide the undecided voter. The parties are throwing spaghetti at the wall hoping something will stick with the undecided voter. Any muck will do because unknown voters are rogue. What is important to them is not important to the typical voter. But these are the very voters that each party needs to put them over the top in close elections.

Which bothers me. The undecided voter could shift one way or the other for most insignificant and obscure of reasons. I know a woman who voted for Trump because she didn’t like the way the Clintons handled Chelsea’s wedding. That is right Chelsea’s wedding became the deciding factor on who got her vote. It revealed to her Hillary Clinton’s true character and it appalled her. Now speaking as a Democrat, who voted for her at least twice but never was wild about her, I can say there are other better examples of why you would vote against Hillary Clinton. Decisions she made, positions she took, I can understand people voting against her for those reasons, this makes sense to me but Chelsea’s wedding? Who cares? Apparently, my friend.

This challenge is always going to be here in a democracy. People make their decisions they way they make decisions. And it is scary because it is so intangible, so unknown. What will get the undecided voter to vote my way?

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I had problems with Catholicism right from the start. Communion troubled my seven year old mind. I just couldn’t grasp why it was a sacrament. I understood Confession even though I hated going. It made sense to me. Confirmation seemed redundant to me. Why do you need both Baptism and Confirmation is beyond me. Still I understand what Confirmation is about. Communion, on the other hand, was nothing short of cannibalism. I am eating the flesh of God. For what purpose. Does taking Communion make you a better person? Not as far as I can tell, so why am I required to eat the flesh and blood of Christ?

Worse still, at least as far as religious faith goes, even as a child, I never believed, for one moment, that the host was the body of Christ. And, I am telling you I was a fairly gullible kid, ask my older brother and sister who delighted into tricking me into going to the basement, which I was terrified of, because they also told me about the horrible things that could happen there, and then locking the door so I couldn’t get out and them laughing at me from beyond the door. Bastards. I spent many hours terrified in the basement based on their trickery but I never was much bothered by all the rules and regulations regarding the proper taking of the Communion wafer. It was a piece of terrible tasting bread.

I bet that a lot of Catholics who take communion would agree. It is just too damn difficult to make any sense of transubstantiation which goes something like this — the priest arrives with some unleavened bread during the Mass he turns it into the body of Christ which, while now being the body of Christ, still looks and tastes like unleavened bread and not the actual body of Christ. Tell me this isn’t difficult to believe.

More importantly, why am I eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. Why would we ever consume the body and blood of anyone much less Jesus? It isn’t in the bible, at least not as an instruction to turn bread into the body of Christ and then partake in the bread.

Communion is based on the Last Supper where Jesus said something about eating bread and remembering him when they did this in the future. It is pretty obvious, at least to me, that Jesus was speaking metaphorically. Firstly, he was very much alive at the Last Supper and, still being human, needed his body. Secondly, it sounds like this bread is my body is the 1st Century idiomatic equivalent of remember me when I’m gone. The body and blood has a less transcendent meaning here and more of a way to say I will be with you, any time you are eating this bread keep this in mind. Somehow this got incorporated into the Catholic Mass as Communion where congregants feast on the body and blood of Christ.

It makes more sense to me as a symbolic reenactment of the Last Supper. That would have meaning to me, that I would understand. But why do priests go to all this trouble of changing bread and wine into Christ and then asking the congregants to eat and drink the body and blood once it has been changed? It doesn’t make me holier. It doesn’t stop me from sinning. What exactly is the purpose?

So, I would say, that I started down the road to perdition on the day I made my first Communion.

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Netflix created a small controversy when it tagged Dahmer as LGBTQ television series. Some in the Gay leadership felt that Dahmer was really about a serial killer who preyed on Gay men. That the murderer was also Gay is irrelevant because the story is about a serial killer and not reflective of Gay life. The bigger concern is that by labeling Dahmer with the LGBTQ tag that Netflix is portraying Gay life in a negative manner. How, really? Do they think that straight people will believe that Jeffrey Dahmer is the role model for all gay men? And Dahmer is, in fact, gay. This is why this tempest in a tea cup has bothered me. Do you only get the LGBTQ label if you show positive portrayals of gay people? This doesn’t seem possible because sometimes Gay people do terrible things. More importantly, sometimes these terrible actions are directly related to the person being Gay.

Then isn’t Dahmer is a good example of that? Could some ambiguous feelings about being gay have contributed to his actions? I would think likely and certainly worth exploring. So, why would a LGBTQ labeling be wrong? Does every show labeled as LGBTQ have to have a positive depiction of Gay life? Where does one draw the line? Would showing a Gay person in depression or with suicidal thoughts risk the same kind of scrutiny as Dahmer? While it would be very nice to only have heroic people in whatever group you are talking about, it is very unlikely. All groups have all types of people even serial killers.

This controversy reminds me of another one involving the movie Cruising. Gay activists in 1979 tried to shut down the making of this movie because of its depiction of the gays into leather and sadomasochism They were afraid that the heterosexual community who, at the time, had very little contact with the gay community would see this depiction of promiscuous sadomasochistic sex play as representative of the whole gay community instead of it being about a small subset of gay people. Instead of just saying no comment and moving onto more important matters, they tried the movie made. In the meantime, these leaders had no problem dissing a significant group of gay men because they failed to represent the perfect gay image. The fact is that some Gay men like S/M, they like it so much that they risk going home with strangers who are potentially dangerous.

Indeed this is part of what Dahmer is showing. Is the allure of a one night stand worth more than the dangers of choosing a killer? I would venture to say that most Gay men have gone home with a stranger. I know I have. That is a very real part of most gay men’s lives which actually may be more beneficial to the average gay than some heroic image guy. These critics want straights to see the white middle-class monogamous couple with 2 children and a dog. It is impossible for one movie to show the entirety of gay life. Some movies will be darker than other movies. These movies may be difficult to watch because they show Gay people engaging in self-destructive or harmful ways. Dahmer happened, and it happened within the gay community. We will just have to leave it up to good judgement of straight people that Dahmer is not your typical gay man.

****Corrected on 10/7/22, 2 paragraph, changed very likely to very unlikely.

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Billy Eichner’s recent gay RomCom called Bros failed to pull in the box office revenue it was expected to. Eichner went on to complain that there was some homophobic backlash against the film. I am sure there is something to that but I am also pretty sure that billing it as a RomCom may have had more to do with it. RomComs are not for everyone — particularly straight men. That’s why RomComs are also know as Chick Flicks. They simply appeal to women more than men.

I, for example, am bored by action pictures. I found the Bourne films a terrific bore — one long chase scene without any plot whatsoever. At least that was my opinion, however, many other people loved the movie and they went to in droves. So if you invited me to a Gay Action film, I probably will decline because it is just something I am not interested in. I find it difficult to believe that any of the straight men I know would willingly attend a RomCom movie, much less a gay RomCom. It has nothing to do with gay either and everything to do with RomCom.

So I don’t think it particularly fair for Eichner to complain about homophobia. He could be correct, but, it is just as likely, that he is wrong. There is no way of knowing until someone digs deeper and asks why didn’t you see this movie. Until then, I think we should give the audience the benefit of the doubt and accept the fact that a lot of straight men don’t want to see RomComs.