EMMETT TILL THERE WAS YOU

The GOP is killing the fiction business because what their talking heads, including your President, say on a virtually hourly basis is so patently inhuman and absurd that we writers who are tasked with making stuff up simply can’t compete.

On the weekend where we found hundreds of thousands of children marching to save their lives, Rick Santorum actually said that they should stop wasting their time rallying for phony gun laws and instead learn CPR.

Let me say his name again:  Rick Santorum

So instead of worrying about being hit with a nuclear bomb, perhaps we should stop trying to engage our enemies in order to dismantle their nuclear weapons programs and use our time to build shelters.  Oh. And learn CPR.

What can I say?  How do you respond to this?  

Someone doctored an image of Parkland student and buzz cut enthusiast Emma Gonzalez so it looked like she was tearing up the Second Amendment.

There has also been an internet campaign to humiliate her because of her proud sexuality.  And she started out as a victim.  That is her only crime.

The fact that this weekend was all about Americans coming together to prevent the ongoing mass slaughter of other Americans—-many of whom are children—was evidently not as important as the ownership of AR-15s which have no justifiable or practical purpose in our non-military lives.

To those of us who practice empathy and heartfelt compassion, the final score this weekend was AR-15,  Parkland Students -2018.

What is deeply sad to me, especially in parts (not all) of the south, is that churches have become Houses of Warships. Even after innocent churchgoers were shot and mutilated by a military grade weapon, the devout praying to guns continues

Last night there were two remarkable programs that said it all to me.   

Sexty Minutes had the Stormy Daniels, well, blow by blow and to my ears, I heard three things.  One:  Your sitting president is a cheating scumbag (which we already knew), Michael Cohn is a bullying scumbag and Two:  Don’t promise that you will try to put Stormy on The Apprentice and then not come through, especially after she took a bullet and had sex with you that she was obviously doing to further her career.  She outright said that she was not attracted to him.  She was attracted to his power.  Which makes me think of the old Hollywood joke: did you hear about the dumb blonde who wanted to further her career so she slept with a writer?

The whole interview was White People Behaving Badly.   Poor Anderson Cooper looked like he had to be sanitized before and after the interview.   I could just hear his thoughts:  THIS is why I’m gay. To me it felt like the first day on the job for a NCSI-like forensic guy who had to cut open the body to see what ate it alive and he never expected this kind of disgusting mess.

There were no bombshells.  No DVDS.  They were just playing Trump’s game of claiming that there were recordings. 

Place any other past President in this picture and next week there would be a shot of them proudly waving goodbye as they board the White House helicopter towards the unemployment line. 

But this time it’s Trump, who makes Bill Clinton look like the real angel of America.  

Since 2016 we have been on  the pathological less traveled, forged by failed screenwriter and buffoon wrangler (beginning with Sarah Palin) Steve Bannon who finally got his “willing idiot” (That’s Lenin, not me) to do his bidding (with promises of unimaginable wealth, zero work and endless golf) while from almost day one we have been mired in what has been a master class in how to commit treason with the Soviet Union beginning with hiring Cambridge Analytica (which also sounds like an Adult film actress) who provided them with all the Facebook fed info that they needed—-including the campaign phrases that American was going to react to.

You, see, we have all been played by Bannon, just like Trump.   He knew that there were enough willing idiots to lemming-follow his willing idiot with the sole purpose of dismantling our Government from the inside out in order to create the most powerful 1% that this country has ever seen.

The thing is, being a failed screenwriter, his scenario stunk and he wound up getting bounced, like a Trump check.

Now the willing idiot is, for the first time in years, actually in charge (by getting rid of anyone who told the baby no) and who does he bring in?  John Bolton who is the Luca Brasi of diplomacy.  We are baby steps away from multiple wars.

The other program that aired last night was a documentary called “Hope and Fury:” MLK, the movement and the media” and it literally blew me away.

I have two words for you: Emmett Till.  Look him up on Wikipedia and make sure you see a picture of his corpse.  I had no idea that journalists were beaten and killed during the Civil Rights protests.  The show was chillingly current on way too many levels including how savvy MLK was about manipulating the media for his purposes.  He understood the impact of visual imagery and when you see black children with ribbons in their hair being hosed down like pigs by local police, it hits you so hard in the gut that you cannot breathe.

I often mourn for our lack of heroes in our lives today.  But when I see black students trying to enter a high school,  black men sitting at a whites only lunch counter, James Meredith trying to enter a college, all met with unimaginable violence, it reminds me of what true heroes are made of.

Worse, it made me think of Charlottesville and as Lester Holt eloquently pointed out, how far back we have gone, all the way back to the kind of white hate that was once the confederate flag waving pride of the Deep South.

America had to literally go to war with this, as JFK and Johnson sent in the Federalized National Guard to restore order, which included bouts of gunfire.

And here we are all over again.  To the south, liberal means, evolution and evolution means having to give up the only life that you have known which in this case includes the stockades of weapons and the insistence that only a man and a woman can marry.  Their God evidently is very picky/choosy about who gets to be loved.

You have to wonder why Mike Pence is such an ardent fan of gay conversion therapy.  Gee, he wouldn’t have a self-loathing secret service side would he?

Despite what Ryan Seacrest said on New Years, we are living in 1964.  On the good side we’re all still listening to The Beatles (thank you SiriusXM!), while on the bad white hate is the new not black.

And we’re all guilty.

The white world is sadly represented by Trump’s abhorrent and virulently hate filled, misogynist man pig behavior which is counterbalanced by his spectacularly stupid and staggering skill free abilities.  He doesn’t even have any common sense, which is on full public display, when he goes to Parkland and poses with thumbs up smiles, golfs at Mar-A-Lago while just a few miles away a student is being buried, throws paper towels at desperate Puerto Ricans, insults Elizabeth Warren (calling her Pocahontas) while giving medals to American Indians, or going down to Louisiana and having no physical contact with any of the hurricane victims to the point that he and his idiot, pull toy wife, Squinty McJimmychoos  have to go back for a better photo op.

The list is endless and staggering.

Then of course there are the rest of the Me First Family who have all been programmed to rape and pillage.  And there are guys like McConnell, Ryan and that spectacular human rights advocate Rick Santorum,

These are men who fight abortion and do nothing to save the lives of children.

It’s called pandering.  Trump to this second still gets a pass from the Evangelicals because he is still delivering their message even though he is banging his way through the syphillistine community.

Personally I think we have to learn to police our own as anyone from our tribe is an ambassador of who we are.  In our society sadly, everyone tends to get lumped together, so extreme crotch grabbing, gangbangers somehow  become part of the same tribe as Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou.

We desperately need to reel in and tough love groom our ambassadors and stop letting the few tarnished low lifes (like Rick Santorum) contaminate our image.

In other words, we need to PARENT.  Where there is trouble there are absentee parents.  And we have to fight to stay parents, because if you are one, like I am, you know that along the way, your kids, who you sculpted from birth, will one day decide to destroy every inch of your art work until they wake up one day and realize and appreciate your work.  And that is why they call birth labor.  Because from day one on it is all work.

Rebellion is in our DNA which is why I love our Parkland Students SO much.

They are the new hippies and sadly they are the new targets.

Maybe that’s what they should call themselves: The Targets.

Every internet site, studio and network advertiser targets them.

But so are mentally ill Christian white men.

Enough. The