I confess one of my favorite movies is the 1966 Italian spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. As the holiday season approaches, we need a list of recent good, bad and uglies.
Let’s start with some good.
Senator Warnock was reelected in Georgia and Herschel Walker is moving back to Texas where he will join other werewolves in their battle to defeat vampires.
A Manhattan jury found the Trump Organization guilty of 17 counts of taxpayer fraud.
Students at Union Square Academy for Health Sciences High School are petitioning the New York City Landmark’s Commission to grant the interior lobby of the historic Washington Irving High School building landmark status.
New additions to the Black Panther and Avatar movie series.
Lionel Messi and Argentina won the World Cup.
Unfortunately there are too many bad things to list all of them.
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Ron DeSantis in the United States to name just a few. Internationally, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Xi Jinping of China, Iranian Supreme Leader Khamene, and Israel’s pending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sorry if I missed someone you think deserves special attention.
COVID infections are surging.
Soccer players and fans were safe in air-conditioned stadiums, but thousands of guest workers may have died bringing the World Cup to Qatar and the Arabian Desert.
The rightwing coalition that will govern Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu will appoint a racist, anti-democratic, homophobic, religious zealot to administer after-school programs.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is maneuvering to head a Congressional Committee in the Republican controlled House of Representatives. Since she is from Georgia, should we anticipate an investigation of whether Senator Warnock was reelected because of secret ties between Hunter Biden’s laptop and Ukraine? Maybe the vampires did it?
This fall Missouri schools removed almost 300 books from library shelves. They include Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus about the Holocaust, graphic novels based on George Orwell’s 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Bible, and the Gettysburg Address, art history books with naked subjects, and comic books about Batman and X-Men. I am a big Wolverine fan and especially upset at banning X-Men books. Wolverine could definitely defeat both vampires and werewolves.
Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin does not want teachers to not teach and students to learn about “divisive concepts.” The new Virginia “Guiding Principles” require that teachers present students with “facts” in “ways that do not ascribe guilt to any population in the classroom” and are “nonjudgmental.” I’ve yet to figure out how to be nonjudgmental about slavery, racism, homophobia, the oppression of women, the exploitation workers, and genocide.
As a teenager, Jerry Jones, owner of the football Dallas Cowboys, was part of the white mob that tried to block Black students from desegregating Little Rock Arkansas schools. He has never apologized.
New York City is launching a campaign to end a plague of rats while Mayor Eric Adams is accused of cronyism and ignoring corruption by his associates. Will the anti-rat campaign put Adams at risk?
And there are some really ugly things to worry about in the future.
At the COP27 climate summit in Egypt, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned humanity is in a “highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” Guterres fears “our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.”
West and Central Africa are hit devastating floods made worse by climate change. The homes and livelihoods of millions of people are threatened. Other areas of the world are suffering through extreme drought conditions.
63% of White men voted Republican in 2022 including 72% of white men who did not attend college. In the initial Georgia Senate election in November, 88% of white born-again Christian men voted for misogynist Herschel Walker. As a white male, I want to find out if it possible to convert to something else?