Monthly Archives: March 2010

Whither Hollywood?

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Seriously, what is it with the people that make our movies? I might almost believe there was something about the higher reaches of show biz that turns people into complete and raving loons. What with a long series of much-ballyhooed movies culminating in The Green Zone, most which in some degree or other, can easily be construed as anti-troops/anti-war productions and most of which have tanked at the box office, an Oscar evening which I didn’t even bother to watch, let alone seeing any of the movies involved, and Tom Hanks near as dammit shooting himself and his TV series The Pacific in the foot with statements about American racism in interviews . . . oh, heck, can I be forgiven for wondering if there something in the water? Never mind how the Hollywood good and the great appeared to jump on the global warmening and the Obama bandwagon, almost simultaneously. Never mind how the Law’n’Order TV concession painted tea partiers as dangerous terrorists. Never mind the incessant slams against the religiously observant, or the monstering of Sarah Palin. The cumulative idiocy is almost too much to be born; it’s almost as if they don’t want us to be watching any of their damned movies or TV at all.

For the record, this last weekend, we went to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which is about the first time in a year that we went to see a first-run movie in the theaters. (Last time it was Gran Torino, if memory serves, and no, I can’t remember what we went to see the time before that.) I might have gone to see Up, and Blondie and I were considering Julie and Julia, but just didn’t feel strongly enough about either to make the effort. Seriously, I used to love going to movies, but somehow and somewhere in the last decade or so I lost my enthusiasm. Between the expense and hassle of actually going to the theater, the sheer badness of most current releases, the speed with which the best of the current crop show up on DVD (where I can ask to do a review and get the darned thing for free) and the steady drip-drip-drip of ignorance and insult directed at flyover, working-class Americans, conservatives, military, and tea partiers – all sourced from the glitterati . . . well, really, what’s the point? Why should I put up with having my values routinely insulted, right along with my intelligence? I have long insisted on skipping anything which features car chases, machine-gun fire and massive explosions, in lieu of plot and dialogue. And I’d prefer to think of actors as a kind of well-trained performing monkey, whose job is to amuse the audience. I do not want them to be lecturing me on politics, history, international relations, global warming or ecology at the drop of a hat or Charlie Sheen’s trousers, whichever happens oftener. Not unless they actually have some professional education or expertise in those fields, which damn few of them appear to do anyway. Stick to entertaining me, dammit.

Check…One-Two, Check-Check…This Thing On?

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Yawns…stretches, cracks knuckles, cracks neck, cracks lower back “ow-ow-ow…sigh.”  Sips coffee.  Thinks.  Alrighty then.

So an “old HS Friend on Facebook” posts that he’s joined “The Coffee Party” (giggle, really?  The best they could do?) and so I come over here to see what Mom’s got and apparently she’s been writing up a storm and then I figure I’d see if my sign-in still works and lo and behold it DOES and so I started thinking about some stuff and what I might want to write about and…deep breath…why yes…yes MY coffee is particularly strong this morning, why do you ask?

Same Old Same Old

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One of the most exasperating elements WRT to tracking the fortunes of the Tea Party movement is going into comment threads here and there and running slap into the constant insistence from commenters of a certain persuasion that Tea Partiers are stupid! Stupid, I say, dumber than dirt! Drooling morons, apparently barely able to find their way to the latrine, the voting booth or to tune their radios to whatever channel is carrying Rush Limbaugh!

They bang on and on about the stupidity and reckless lack of clue among the Tea Party set constantly, seemingly impervious to any contrary evidence – such as that of my own lying eyes. Of the activists who launched my local tea party, included among them was a corporate lawyer – an A & M grad (so of course the jokes about that are endless), a professor at a local and notoriously expensive and upscale private university, a madly creative and seriously eccentric video producer, a IP techie of proven skills and a very hot temper, a military contractor specializing in very high-end specialist software, a good few scrappy real estate agents, an academic doctor . . . and then myself, the historical novelist. There was also the married lady of irreproachable virtue and deeply Christian principles who had at one point in her now-distant youth been a Playboy Bunny, a guy with a long career in print media sales who now runs a tiny construction bidness of his own, and we have since added another two lawyers, an insurance-firm executive and others of the same professional ilk. In other words, lots of professionals, managers, and graduate degrees The picture ought to be fairly clear, I would think – not too terribly many mouth-breathers among the cadre of the seriously involved, but bless their hearts, the leftoid commenters everywhere have only a few horses to flog when it comes to the Tea Party, so they flog it relentlessly. (The other equine targets being ‘you’re all raaaaacist!’ and ‘you’re all tools of the GOP/Fox News’ being the main ones, although “where were you when Booooosh maneuvered us into two illegal wars/put us into a deficit first!” is being brought around from the stable.)

It’s pathetic – this is all they have, when anyone who has ever attended, or had anything to do with a Tea Party knows that the dumb/racist/GOP tool is not only false, but completely lame. Seriously, pukes – do you want to have any credibility left as a sentient being, after November, 2010? And then I think – perhaps that is all they have. No real and workable ideas, no energy, no stamina for the dull and boring labor of actually doing political activism, the kind that takes years, the kind which consumes your life, the kind of work done by William Wilberforce and Tom Paine, by Abraham Lincoln and Lucy Stone. For a while, I did battle in comment threads, regarding the derisive epithet “tea-bagger” – I said (over and over) that using it in a discussion of the Tea Party was like using the word “n****r” in a discussion of civil rights. Eh, I think my point has been made. Of late I don’t much waste time objecting to the use of it, since it has become a time-saver. Someone using it has already marked themselves as so bigoted and essentially closed-minded that they are hardly worth wasting time and pixels over. I have to save my energy for the long fight. I can’t waste time over correcting fools.

Oh, and yeah – I have to save enough energy to earn a living, and to write some more books; currently have drafted six chapters for “The Quivera Trail” and five and a half for “Gone to Texas.”

In the meantime, it looks like my suspicions from last week about the so-called Coffee Party being nothing more than a fresh roll of Axelrod Astroturf? Oh, yeah – big time. The blogosphere is on the hunt. I deduce that fresh scalps will soon be joining those on the drying-rack next to those lifted from the heads of the global-warming crowd. Good times, people, good times.