Thumbs Up
This month would've marked film critic Roger Ebert's 78th birthday. As it happens, over the weekend I bumped into an essay on race he wrote ten years ago last Saturday. This was after he'd lost his voice, a period during he which he wrote some of his strongest and most personal essays.
The spark that drove lifelong liberal Ebert (who grew up before the "Whites Only" signs had come down) to write How Do They Get To Be That Way? was an incident in Prescott, Arizona where local artists were ordered to lighten the skin of the kids in a school wall mural because the darker skin hurt the racists' feelings and they kept driving by and shouting racial slurs. The essay says nothing about the police, and yet it kinda says a lot about them and their Trump cultist supporters (Hi, Bill Barr) as we find ourselves in our current predicament. There's a snippet below the fold, but as the saying goes, every word is worth re-reading.
Continued…
[W]hat about the people in those cars? … They don't think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don't like those kids in the school. It's not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever "they" are.
Not along ago I read this observation by Clint Eastwood: "The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice." Do the drive-by haters feel insecure? How are they threatened? What have they talked themselves into? Who benefits by feeding off their fear? We have a black man in the White House, and I suspect they don't like that very much. They don't want to accept the reality that other races live here right along with them, and are doing just fine and making a contribution and the same sun rises and sets on us all. Do they fear their own adequacy? Do they grasp for assurance that they're "better"—which means, not worse? Those poor people. It must be agony to live with such hate, and to seek the company of others so damaged.
I miss Roger.
-
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, June 8, 2020
Note: June is Inspect Your Bunker Month. If you don’t have an up-to-date inspection sticker on your top hatch (not mid-hatch or bottom hatch), you could be fined up to $250. A friendly reminder from your friends at…well, we could tell you but then we'd have to kill you. Just inspect the bunker and we'll avoid any unpleasantness, okay? Okay. —Mgt.
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the March on Washington to protest racism and policed brutality: 82
Trump's current approval rating among Catholics, according to PRRI polling, down from 60% in March: 37%
Percent of Americans polled by CBS News who are satisfied with the way Trump has dealt with the response to George Floyd's death in Minneapolis: 31%
Percent in the same poll who believe things in America are moving in the right direction: 28%
Actual likely U.S. unemployment rate, versus the “official” 13.3% rate due to an error in data collection, according to CNBC: 16%
Portion of the 2.5 million job gains in May that came from the restaurant and dentistry sectors: 2/3
Current matchup numbers for Mark Kelly (D) and Martha McSally (Moscow) in the U.S. Senate race in Arizona, according to Fox News polling: 50%-37%
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: Monday…
-
CHEERS to a busy, angry, peaceful, Trump-scorching weekend. If you're just coming off the mushrooms you dropped Friday night, here's some of what you missed:
♡ Huge and peaceful protests continued across the country and around the world (a slave trader went “toodles” in Bristol), notably at the Golden Gate Bridge (which now whistles), Philadelphia, and D.C., where "DEFUND THE POLICE" was added to "BLACK LIVES MATTER" on a street leading to the White House.
♡ New York City lifted its curfew a day early. Seattle’s mayor banned the use of pepper spray.
♡ Minneapolis's mayor was booed out of a protest because he wouldn’t commit to abolishing the police department in its current form and rebuild it from scratch. The city council plans to do it anyway.
♡ A second memorial service was held for George Floyd in Raeford, North Carolina. His funeral and burial in his hometown of Houston will happen tomorrow.
♡ Two Buffalo police officers were charged with assault for knocking down that 75-year-old protester and letting him lie there bleeding out of his ears.
♡ That bicyclist who assaulted a kid and two adults for putting up messages of peace along a fence in Maryland has been identified and charged with, 2nd-degree assault, and you'll never guess what! He's awful sorry.*
(*…that he got caught.)
And with news that George W. Bush is on board the Biden Train, that means all of our living former presidents—who know firsthand what a pressure-cooker the job is and will typically defend one another through thick and thin—are planning to hoist their middle finger to Donald Trump in November. And also the ghosts of 35 of the 40 dead ones, according to my forthcoming book, Well That Was Weird.
CHEERS to the next president of the United States. He did it, folks. Friday night Uncle Joe crossed the finish line:
Joe Biden formally clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Friday, setting him up for a bruising challenge to President Donald Trump that will play out against the unprecedented backdrop of a pandemic, economic collapse and civil unrest. […]
Biden now has 1,993 delegates, with contests still to come in eight states and three U.S. territories.
Under normal conditions, I'd be holding my breath waiting for the media to seize on his every innocent gaffe as if it was the end of our republic. But then I remember that the guy he's planning to dislodge in November is actually trying to end our republic. So now it would seem that Joe's the one who could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected. Strange times.
P.S. Remember the smear campaign against Joe's son Hunter that led to the president's impeachment for extorting favors from Ukraine to help swing the 2020 election? Ukraine investigators have cleared Hunter of any wrongdoing. What else ya got, Rudy?
CHEERS to hot Joe-on-Joe action. 66 years ago this week, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, attorney Joseph Welch quietly destroyed bedraggled, belligerent Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (and his little brat lawyer Roy Cohn, who would later clutch Trump’s ankles for money) with the immortal words: "Have you no sense of decency,sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
-
Within a couple years McCarthy was dead of alcoholism, and today his grave is guarded by a giant emaciated demon vulture. Birds of a feather.
-
BRIEF SANITY BREAK
-
-
END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
-
JEERS to keeping count. Along with the millions who took to the streets over the weekend, the Covid-19 pandemic marched not-so-merrily along, and our macabre Monday tradition of maintaining a benchmark of the awfulness for the C&J historical record continues. Let’s check the most depressing tote board in the world with all due reluctance:
9 weeks ago: 288,000 confirmed cases, 7,000 deaths.
5 weeks Ago: 987,000 confirmed cases, 55,000 deaths.
1 week ago: 1.8 million confirmed cases, 106,000 deaths
This morning: 2 million confirmed cases, 112,000 deaths
On Friday the president, who’s getting terrible marks for dealing with the pandemic, visited a swab factory here in Maine. Afterwards they had to throw out all the swabs. Not because they were worried people would catch the coronavirus from them. They were worried people would catch the Trump from them.
CHEERS to great moments in dust busting. Ives McGaffey of Chicago patented the first mechanical ("whirlwind") vacuum cleaner on this date in 1869. It was a crude device—the butler sucked on a hose.
-
Ten years ago in C&J: June 8, 2010
JEERS to putting the past behind us. So, uh...you remember that itty-bitty li'l bump-in-the-road in Bhopal, India, during which over 2,000 people died instantly in 1984 when Union Carbide spilled a chemical that I believe was called Killitol? It was in all the papers for awhile, but then it disappeared. Well, it looks like justice has finally been served 25 years after the fact. Seven former Union Carbide executives will be spending the rest of their lives behind bars (assuming they only have 2 years left to live), and be forced to pay a fine of one gazillion dollars (assuming that by "gazillion" you mean "2 thousand"). Case closed nothing to see here please move along.
-
And just one more…
JEERS to stupid God tricks. Over the weekend, while you were sleeping, an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building plowed into Earth (no need to click on the link, you can trust me) instantly turning soil, water and our magma core to dust, but not before all carbon-based life forms were transmogrified into glitter. (Figure that one out, Einstein.)
Suspecting this was going to happen, the Good Lord hired Microsoft to store a backup "Blue Marble" in the Cloud—updated in real time—that could instantaneously replace the old one if necessary. So as you rise and shine and wipe the sleepies out of your eyes, take a moment to realize that you're a perfect copy—thoughts, feelings, aches, pains, and everything else—of who you were just before the meteor did its dirty work. There’s one minor exception: thanks to inept Gary in Coding Bay J-7: you now have a new tentacle. Keep an eye on your email—they're working on a patch.
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
“What Bill in Portland Maine needs—what we parents say when we are dealing with an intractable child, he needs a time-out.”
—George Will
-