The Weekend in Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN. My date was cancelled and I sat and watched the returns. After 2016, I wasn’t surprised or emotional. We’ve all been through this before. If those of us on the Left or Left of Center can get a grip this time around, we may learn something rather than looking at the Right and deciding they’re stupid or racist or sexist. Sure, those things are true but we need to look long in the mirror.

Trump didn’t win this as much as Harris, and the tepid embrace of the pronoun correcting crowd, lost it.

The result is clear—just over half of Americans prefer a lying, buffoonish criminal than a self righteous scold. America is a woman who says she prefers a good guy who is socially conscious, respectful, and attentive to her needs but ends up with the bad boy who treats her like shit but can rail her like a pitbull in bed. America is a guy who says he wants a liberated, empowered, independent woman but ends up with the broad who will give him a blowjob in the bathroom of an Applebee’s.

Easy enough to focus on Trump but America voted for a Republican Senate, too. That says more about the state of the union than the top spot. The mandate given to the GOP is that a just over half majority of Americans who voted have been walking on eggshells culturally, using terms like LatinX and birthing person to placate the most strident, all while waiting for an opportunity to shift the narrative through gritted teeth.

Now, the left-leaning slightly less than half of the country will go into a cycle of finger pointing and desperately trying to justify why they lost so epically. We will blame the result on the ignorance and culturally backward perspectives of the MAGA cohort. We will blame black and brown men for tipping certain scales in favor of the orange king. We will castigate older Americans for being afraid of the future. We won’t blame ourselves, though, and that will be the same mistake we made in 2016.

There was nothing wrong about the Harris campaign. She took a belated pill from Biden and ran with it in a massive and optimistic push. It wasn’t the campaign. It was us. The Trump voters don’t love him, they hate us. If we move in a forward direction, it is essential that we try to understand why they hate us and change strategies to take that into account.

Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals and rule you like a king. — Sideshow Bob in “The Simpsons

FILTERING THE NOISE. I have been (rightly) asked to refrain from writing online about my specific location of work and will willingly comply. I am, for the most part, an unfiltered ass. What I find extremely funny, others find excessively offensive. I sometimes forget that and bruise some feelings along the way. For that I am contrite (mostly). The days when my writing was a bludgeon are long gone (almost). As management, I have a responsibility to my staff and my employers.

Been here before with the public radio station back in the day. Should’ve learned the lesson then.

It isn’t like I don’t have filters and verboten subjects. This is just one I put on to keep the rent paid.

DIFFERENT IS SCARY. I was in the house for the Chicago premiere of Robert Zemeckis’s HERE and the packed audience loved it. It is, as Zemeckis told us from the stage, an attempt to give audiences something different, unprecedented. It’s a big swing conceptually. It is not a Marvel film or a thing with cars and tits. It’s not a revenge fantasy. It’s weird and new.

People have not embraced the different. It’s a legit bomb. Lots of money has been lost on this film.

I suppose that has been the case for most of our society’s evolution. The collective we do not like different. We are either disgusted by it or afraid of it or are simply living a fragile existence based on the illusion of security and safety that when anything pops up that challenges our notions of what is normal, we avoid, shun, or destroy it.

Me? I like the big swings. The weird. The different. Back in the days of the theater company I ran, if everyone else was going one way, we went the other. Above the entrance a sign stated to all who entered “Nothing is Sacred. Not Even You.” I still believe that except now we all feel like each of us is sacrosanct and everyone else is fodder for the vitriol and rage of our divine disregard.

Nothing is Sacred. Not Even You.

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It’s been a busy week. A weird week for our country. Try not to dwell on things beyond your control because it was beyond your control from the get. Find time to read, watch a movie, take a nap. The world keeps turning and, who knows? Someone orange could choke on a Big Mac and everything could change for the better.