Friday's upon us, it's definitely winter outside, and another day I'm just not into doing this. So, we'll knock things out quick and move on to the weekend. I doubt I'll be in a better mood, but hope springs eternal.
Unfortunately, after the Big Impeachment earlier in the week, there just isn't that much interesting going on. Trump is still raging and sputtering in anger, this time mad because the outgoing editor-in-chief of Christianity Today said the guy who's spent the last 30 years bragging about being an amoral sleazebag was an amoral sleazebag. Tulsi Gabbard showed her colors by voting "present" on impeachment, letting everyone know that she didn't really want to be president or piss off Tucker Carlson. Mark Meadows, one of the bigger Trump do-boys in the House, became the twenty-first Republican Representative to announce his retirement, perhaps angling for a Chief of Staff job in case his career wasn't completely tanked.
Of course, there's more to The News than just what interest me, but since no one's paying me to write this, I'll do as I please. The little dweebs who flashed the "OK we're just joking about this being a white power symbol" hand sign behind a black cadet's on national television during the Army-Navy game last week won't face any serious discipline because West Point decided they weren't being racist little nerds. I got a cousin who was accepted to West Point to play football and on academic merits, but the Army rejected him because of his asthma.
He was sorely disappointed, of course, and because it was so late in the game, he could only play at some junior college in Florida. He gave up on football after getting hurt and is now enrolled at Mississippi State, doing well. I'm so glad he didn't go to West Point for any number of reasons, but mainly because they let shit like this slip through as "boys will be boys". And anyone who wants me to believe some upper-class white kids were just playing "the circle game" will have to try harder and I don't feel one whit bad about that.
I've been reading Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country: A Novel and it's not bad. It mixes in the standard Lovecraftian themes - esoteric cults, dark things in the Woods, ancient dark magic - with the all-too-real horrors of Jim Crow America and the awful shit the average African American had to deal with from white authority just to get through the day. So far, it's fairly engaging, but I do wonder if I'm reading too much Lovecraft-inspired stuff. The man himself was a notable writer if overly purple with his prose, and everyone pretty much agrees it was his ideas of horrors beyond man's comprehension in an uncaring universe, and for whatever reason, that appeals to me right down to the soles of my feet. Still, it's not exactly what one would call cheery subject matter.
I could talk about the kerfuffle Elizabeth Warren started at the Democratic dedicates the other night when she got on Pete Buttigieg's case about holding fundraising events with the extremely wealthy in "wine caves", whatever the hell those are and how that's the only form of "class warfare" rich people care about. But honestly, I can't be bothered to come up with anything beyond "screw billionaires and re-distribute their wealth" and that's just not helpful.
Or I could discuss the can of worms J.K. Rowling opened by defending a woman who claimed the she was discriminated against in favor of a trans person when it turned out it didn't happen that way and Rowling was mostly showing everyone (and not for the first time) that she's sort of awful about trans issues. However, that rubs up against one of my foundations of thought, which is: famous people aren't good sources of opinion and probably, on the whole, you're better off ignoring them.
In any event, I never cared for the Harry Potter books and as I've said a number of times, being a fan of country music way before I became politically liberal seems to have inured me from being put out by my favored artists' unpleasant political stances. Sure, the occasional Willie Nelson or Dolly Parton is nice, but art is art and Hank Williams Jr. can just shut up and sing.
All right, that's plenty. Have a nice weekend and we'll see if we can't whip ourselves into a better mood by Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are moderated, & may be discarded & ignored if so chose. Cry more & die, man.