Freak Out Friday – December 29, 2017

First, an update on pain: I am somewhat on the mend. I am now able to walk with a cane as opposed to a walker. Also my neurologist’s office called yesterday and confirmed that I have several pinched nerves on my spine. So now it’s just a matter of finding a way to make it relax. Thanks all of you for your patience as my body, for the third time in five years, selected the holidays as the perfect time to fall apart.

As for Trump:

He has actually been somewhat quiet recently, although the lies keep coming.

1) Give ‘em Hëll, Ðûmbášš: Trump, along with his people, has claimed that he signed more legislation into law than Harry Truman. This is, of course, a lie. Trump has actually signed less legislation than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. But in his mind, he has surpassed Truman. And his followers believe him, and Fox News parrots him, and once again the concept of truth takes a beating.

2) Just the facts. Credit Trump with achieving a major accomplishment. The non-Partisan, Pulitzer winning site PolitiFact.com presented their annual award for Lie of the Year. The winner, of course, was Trump, who told Lester Holt of NBC that “This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story.” Along with other whoppers such as “I am not a crook” and “I did not have sex with that woman,” I’m reasonably sure that statement will come back to haunt him.

The thing is, I’ve been pretty depressed about Trump over the past year. Depressed about him, worried about the country falling apart. But recently I saw something that buoyed me somewhat.

A great movie was on TCM the other day: “The Front.” Starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel, it’s set during the 1950s when the government was obsessed with Communists (much the same way that Trump is obsessed with Muslims.) Allen’s character is friends with a television writer who has been blacklisted, so Allen puts his name on the scripts and the guy can earn a living while Allen makes ten percent off each sale. It’s a terrific film, and it presents an America that seems to be a completely alien world. People are prosecuted for what they think and say. They are driven into hiding and sometimes even kill themselves because they can’t stand what their lives have become.

When I first saw the film in the theaters decades ago, I felt like I was watching an alien country. But when I watched it a couple days ago, I saw a lot of what’s going on now. Good and decent people being treated like criminals simply because of their beliefs. The First Amendment being readily tossed aside. A bullying politician throwing his weight around and people quivering with fear over what he’ll say or who he’ll next target.

But you know what? It got better.

The evil leader of the movement was brought down. The country remembered what it was supposed to be about. America recaptured its soul.

We’ve done it before. We can do it again.

PAD

10 comments on “Freak Out Friday – December 29, 2017

  1. Whoa! I don’t visit for a while and I miss all the bad news! So sorry to hear of your tribulations (tribble-ations?) but pleased to hear things are improving. Pleased also to end the year on two notes of hope. Happy New Year to you and your family!

  2. “The evil leader of the movement was brought down. The country remembered what it was supposed to be about. America recaptured its soul.

    We’ve done it before. We can do it again.”

    Not word for word, but my mom has been saying this for the last year. And as conservative Christian woman who despises everything Cocoa Puffs stands for, I tend to believe her. (Yes, I am a godless liberal, but hey, she’s mom.)

    TAC

    1. Should be “She’s a conservative…” not “And as a…” sounds like I am a conservative Christian woman.
      Brain out. Not enough coffee.

  3. Glad you are beginning to feel better hope you continue to get better.

    Thank you for reminding us all that America as a nation can and should be better than Trump would have us believe and I think we have begun to see that. Yes, there will always be the completely misguided but as long as you and others are still plugging away things can get better.

    It is a bit like that here in Brexit land, very depressing if you just listen to the news and see the politicians getting it wrong again and again but then sometimes you see a program completely unrelated to Brexit but talking to real people in the UK and you think ‘Hey with the amazing people we have in this country maybe we can come through this thing and not just survive but thrive despite the politicians best efforts to thwart us.’ Also sometimes it doesn’t always seem like it but there are some great MP’s (Members of Parliament) out there. Like Jo Cox who was sadly murder by a deluded idiot who was a follower of the far right group Britain First (yes the group whose video’s Trump re-tweeted.) Jo Cox was an amazing MP who worked hard for her constituents and was all about bringing people together. Thanks to her husband her memory is being kept alive and her legacy is to remember ‘we have more in common than that which divides us.’ It is people like that that we have to remember and help bring people together and help our great nation through any difficulties. The terrorist attacks we had here were awful but the peoples response to it made me feel proud to be British.

  4. The Only President We Have did what i’m sure his White House staff are afraid he’ll do – talked to the press in an impromptu session with no handlers around.
    .
    As you may know, the NYTimes got hold of him at Mar a Lago the other day, and he talked to them and boasted about what a great President he is.
    .
    And in thirty minutes, he said sixteen times that there was no collusion, that everybody knows that, etc., etc. …
    .
    Every two minutes for the whole half hour, he denied that there was any collusion.

  5. But you know what? It got better.
    .
    The evil leader of the movement was brought down. The country remembered what it was supposed to be about. America recaptured its soul.

    .
    Yeah, we’ll recover and progress. I just wish we didn’t always have to deal with these giant steps backward.
    .
    Imagine where we’d be today in terms of a strong middle class, economic stability, healthcare, how the world sees America, etc etc if it had been Clinton-Gore-Obama-Clinton without the massive setbacks of our last four Republican presidents.

  6. I saw The Front this past June when I photographed the screenwriter of that film, Walter Bernstein, when my alma mater hosted a screening followed by a Q&A with him and Sony Pictures Classics co-founder and co-president Michael Barker. Lee Grant, who like Bernstein, was also blacklisted during McCarthy, was there too.
    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:6.7.16_The_Front_screening_and_Q%26A

    Thinking over the film and comparing it to today, I don’t think that film makes the best parallel. As horrible as McCarthyism and other witchhunts go (Hecky’s suicide is certainly a rough scene, as was the real life tragedy of the suicide of Bernstein’s friend, Phillip Loeb, on which it was based), at least those blacklisted are still in the U.S. and free to walk the streets. I shudder to think of the people unable to get into the U.S. deported, and ripped from their families by Trump, simply because they happen to be Mexican, or Muslim, or not a member of the staff of one of Trump’s hotels.

  7. I really need to see The Front; amazingly, I’ve somehow never managed it.

    Much, much more importantly, though — really glad to hear that things are improving on the pain front, PAD, and that shift from walker to cane is a big deal. Best wishes for a continued recovery!

    1. And clearly, it’s been way too long since I’ve used formatting tags. Sorry about that; only The Front should be italicized. I think I’ve got it right this time…

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