Monthly Archives: July 2024

07/31/2024
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Chappell Roan, Drag Queens, Petro-masculinity

506 Words: They’re Drag Queens Too!

I’ve just become hipped to a couple of things that may be familiar to a good number of people. I guess that’s the price I pay for not having a smartphone; I’m not alerted 24 hours a day to the emergence of every single new pop star or the outrage I should be feeling over one cultural phenomenon or another.

Anyway, the two things:

  1. Chappell Roan
  2. Petro-masculinity

At first glance, they may be two of the most disparate concepts imaginable. But I’m here to tell you they are two sides of the same coin.

Alright, in case you are currently as oblivious to them as I used to be:

  1. Chappell Roan is the hottest of hot new pop stars, wowing ’em from Coachella to the Tonight Show. Her star became a supernova when she adopted a drag queen look. She employs as many over-the top, stereotypical feminine signifiers as she can in her stage persona. She reminds me of all the parading drag queens I used to see walking down Broadway Avenue in Chicago back in the ’80s, their habiliment, their gait, their attitude all screaming an exaggerated, cartoonish woman-ness. The Roan phenomenon is all hugely fun and rebellious; she appeals to 16-year-old girls and 18-year-old gay boys who dance and scream and adore her. When the camera pans the crowd at a typical Chappell Roan show it’s a scene of pure delirium.
  2. Petro-masculinity is…, oh, man, this is weird…, it’s a cultural moniker describing the most zealous climate-change deniers in America, white macho-men. They loathe environmentalists, acc’d’g to a 2011 academic study, to “protect their cultural identity.” Virginia Tech University political scientist Cara Daggett invented the specific term in 2018. Men, she reasoned, were solely in charge of the world from the Industrial Revolution onward, a time when the universe moved thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. Taking away fossil fuels just to save the planet, these guys hold, robs them of their exalted place in society. They scream an exaggerated, cartoonish male-ness.

This whole swath of the American populace gets tumescent over huge pickup trucks with rifle racks in the cab, that can “roll coal,” and sport “truck nutz.”

These fellows parade about displaying every conceivable symbol of what they consider masculinity. And, almost to a man, they dig a certain ex-President of the United States and harbor a general affinity for authoritarianism.

Their ethos is certainly not fun and rebellion ala the Chappell Roan gang. Nevertheless, they and the teenaged girls and young gay boys who swoon over the legally-named Kayleigh Amstutz are joined at the hip.

This petro-masculinity business is as over-the-top as the lineup of featured performers any Saturday night at the Baton Show Lounge.

And whereas the Chappell Roan crowd celebrates a harmless burlesque of gender typing while the petro-masculine-ists cry out for an oppressive gender toxicity, they are to each other what a photograph is to its negative.

Petro-masculine guys are, to be sure, just male drag queens!

It’s all a stage performance, although neither Chappell Roan’s show nor the Baton on a Saturday night stinks of diesel fumes.

07/29/2024
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Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Laughter

900 Words: Don’t Laugh

The two-time popular vote loser whose name I’m often loath to say/print/hear has quickly found a hammer to beat Kamala Harris over the head with. He now calls her Laughin’ Kamala Harris, adding cachinnation (yep, swear to god, it’s a real word — look it up!) to his dependable bag of slurs and characterizations that include Sleepy Joe, Crazy Bernie, Pocahontas, Crooked Hillary, Stone Cold Phony Beto O’Rourke, Snowman(woman) Amy Klobuchar, Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and…, and…, well, there’ve been way too many to list here.

The 45th President of the United States has a lengthy track record of failures — marital, personal, business, political, and…, and…, well, again there’ve been way to many to list here. He is a master, though, a virtuoso, an artist, a prodigy of insults. He makes the bully you might remember from high school look like Marianne Williamson.

Harris, apparently, emits huge guffaws, deep gut, from the heart, kitchen table salvos of laughter. The convicted felon, serial stiffer of contractors, and proud pussy grabber finds such uninhibited emotion something to ridicule.

Soon after it became apparent Harris would be the new Democratic candidate for president, the GOP standard=bearer said: “Have you ever watched her laugh? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh…. She is nuts.”

This new line of affront should come as no surprise inasmuch as the man spewing it never, ever, ever laughs. I mean really laughs. He’s clearly incapable of feeling and expressing pure joy. He cannot, it is obvious, let himself go. He’s as tightly wound as the hawsers of an ocean liner at port. Not only that, he never really smiles. Oh sure, he smirks a lot, especially when, for instance he asks the crowd at one of his rallies what we should do with all the people coming over our southern border and someone responds, “Shoot them!”

But smirking is not smiling. Smiling communicates happiness, something that runs counter to his message and the visceral appeal he has to a sizable portion of the American electorate. He — and they — are much more comfortable living in their cesspool of rage and grievance. To smile, to laugh, to say “Ah, I feel good this morning,” is foreign to them.

Perhaps it’s generational.

Many Trumpists are aging white people, the kinds of folks who recall their parents telling them about the Great Depression and World War II. I’m an aging white person (who, natch, does not count himself among that sulky set). I recall those of my parents’ generation telling tales about bread lines; soup kitchens; unemployment; meat, sugar, and tire rationing; global bloodletting, Nazis, sneak attacks, the Holocaust, and any number of other horrors they faced everyday starting in 1930 and lasting for the next 15 years. That so-called Greatest Generation might have found laughter a luxury. How can one belly laugh when nobody can find a job and 60 million people are being slaughtered?

My father, for example, was made uncomfortable by the sound of children’s laughter. Any number of times, when my brother and I would be off giggling in another room, Dad would shout from his recliner, “Stop that laughing!”

Even as an eight-year-old, I found that downright bizarre. I never felt, when so scolded, that I was doing something wrong. Dad, I concluded, was a miserable crank.

As I grew older, I’d tell others of my generation about this and they’d say, “Oh yeah, my Dad yelled at us all the time for laughing too! It was so weird!” It was a phenomenon common to working class families. My old man and the millions of his generation grew up squeezing pennies, being forced to go to work at the age of 13 and 14, then getting drafted to fight in bitter cold, African deserts, and South Pacific jungles. When peace and prosperity came at last, they had to spend most of their waking lives working at unrewarding jobs in soulless factories, where their health was endangered and their spirits crushed.

The sound of kids laughing must have been, to guys like my father, worse than the 120-decibel din of fingernails on a blackboard.

The Republican candidate for President of the United States is 78 years old. His old man imparted to him a deep abhorrence to laughter. Mary Trump has written that Fred Trump warned his son against laughter. To do so, the old man said, “is to make yourself vulnerable. It’s to let down your guard in some way.

Which is true. We do become vulnerable when we laugh. We do let our guard down to guffaw. These are necessary releases, as important to our health as fresh air, clean water, a balanced diet, exercise, and a good lay every now and then.

“Laughter,” senior editor Michael Mechanic of Mother Jones writes, “is pretty much universally seen as positive. Indeed, the list of prominent people who have spoken and written of the value of laughter is long. It includes Catherine the Great, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Wolfe, and on and on. Perhaps more relatable to Trump would be Andrew Carnegie, who is credited as saying: ‘There is little success where there is little laughter.'”

How sad that an entire population of men grew up in dread fear of laughter. How sad that tens of millions of us want one of them to become our leader — again.

 

 

07/23/2024
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2024 Election, Bigotry, Kindness

639 Words: Random Thoughts

● I dunno about you, but I feel as though I can breathe again. Joe Biden announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race marked the first time I’ve felt upbeat about the November election.

● Kamala Harris is a spectacularly uninspiring speaker. That said, she just may be the perfect foil for Donald Trump, inasmuch as she’s a calm, cool, collected former prosecutor. Her best play over the next three-plus months is to hammer away at the ex-president’s lengthy record of spewing misinformation and outright fabrications, his criminal conviction, the civil judgements against him, his history of stiffing contractors, his numerous business failures, and his fraudulent “university” and “charitable” foundation. If she does this in an understated, relentless manner, she just might drive him to start raving like a maniac again.

● Secret Service boss Kimberley Cheatle has just resigned. Good. The single most important job of the Secret Service is to protect the president and candidates for the office. It didn’t do that on July 13th. And while nobody or no agency is perfect, the Secret Service’s miscue in allowing a lunatic kid armed with a high-powered rifle to take up a straight shot position on a roof overlooking the platform where Trump was speaking was inexcusable.

● Sticking with the assassination attempt, Biden flubbed it when he immediately declared confidence in Cheatle in the aftermath of the shot. That was as dumb as George W. Bush’s, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job” remark even as millions tried to recover from Hurricane Katrina despite FEMA’s blunders.

● One last thought on the shot that bloodied Trump: I don’t buy that it was a bullet that hit his ear. A bullet fired by a high-powered rifle travels so fast, creates such a powerful localized field of atmospheric turbulence, and is accompanied by such a powerful sonic blast that if perchance the bullet did strike DT’s earflap, it would have knocked him clear off his feet, caused significant damage to that side of his face and head, sent him snoring with at very least the mother of all concussions, and even possibly causing potentially fatal brain damage. No, my guess is one of the bullets fired by the little bastard struck an object — perhaps a teleprompter screen — that shattered, with a shard hitting Trump.

● I’m betting Kamala Harris tabs PA Gov. Josh Shapiro as her VP running mate. Imagine: between the two of them, the 2024 Democratic pair will be Black, Indian, female, and Jewish. And you thought the most deplorable of the Trump basketful went apeshit over a nice, suburban, Anglo presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Just watch how they react to this year’s melting pot ticket!

● JB Pritzker, governor of my home state of Illinois, also has been mentioned as a possible Harris veep. Ain’t gonna happen, though. Fat people do not do well in national politics. In fact, the last two generally tolerated bigotries in this holy land are those targeting fatties and atheists. Anyway, have you heard Pritzker’s commencement address at Northwestern University in 2023? He speaks plainly and boldly about the different between kind people and, in his word, idiots. Here it is:

● Pritzker, Part II: I like him a lot. And I wouldn’t hold his girth against him. I just don’t like the idea of another billionaire running things.

● Tomorrow will mark the 55th anniversary of the splashdown of Apollo 11. Fifty five freaking years, people! For perspective, 55 years before that event in 1969 would have been — hold on a minute while I whip out my calculator — 1914. That was the year the first regularly scheduled airplane passenger service was initiated, connecting St. Petersburg and Tampa, a 23-mile air trek. Oh, and some loony Bosnian Serb nationalist shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, setting off the first of the 20th century’s two world wars. We are, to be sure, a confounding species.

 

07/19/2024
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2024 Election, Donald Trump, Joe Biden

440 Words: American Exceptionalism

As much of the rest of the world rejects strongmen, totalitarian regimes, right wing reactionaries, and outright jerks, our holy land look to be hurtling headlong into a second, non-consecutive term for the unlikeliest president of my — or your — lifetime.

And, make no mistake, Donald J. Trump is nothing if not a wannabe strongman, aspiring boss of a totalitarian regime, currently a right wing reactionary, and, yeah, an outright jerk.

Somehow, some way, by the weirdest, most unforeseen sequence of events, the largely innocuous presidency of Joe Biden has become indelibly etched into the minds of most American voters as a failure, a disaster, or at least an administration led by a doddering old coot with a foot in the grave and a mind in the grip of severe senility. Image is everything and that picture of the sitting prez is the one tens of millions of folks’ll be bringing into the voting booth this coming November.

That is, if Old Joe stays in the race, a potentiality growing less likely with every passing day.

Or not. Maybe — just maybe — Biden will stay in for the long haul. The result may be a real haul for the Trump Party (forget calling  it the Republican Party anymore because it’s his and his alone). The TP may just snatch the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate this fall.

My brother emailed me a few days ago asking if I thought the shooting attempt at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally last Saturday was the tipping point for the race this year. I responded that I won’t make any predictions as I’d learned my lesson in 2016. The very idea of a numbskull like Donald Trump eight years ago becoming President of the United States of America, that bright shining light on a hill, the arsenal of democracy, the melting pot, this unique experiment in representative government…, and,  hell, whatever other grandiose descriptor you can think of, was a joke. Yep. Matt Groening got yuks out of cartooning a future America wherein Trump had become president in a 2000 episode of “The Simpsons.”

What a riot! And I’m not referring to the January 6th Insurrection at the US Capitol in the wake of Trump throwing a tantrum because he’d lost the 2020 election.

Lo and behold, Donald Trump appears a good bet to become the 47th President.

Again, how in the hell did this all come about? As France, the UK, and Iran have snubbed far right candidates this year, and Poland and Brazil have done the same previously, we Americans seem to be ready to embrace one. I guess contrarianism is in the American DNA.

07/13/2024
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Marathons

955 Words The Running Craze

I’ve never understood marathons.

My go-to comment whenever anybody brings up the topic is: You know there are cabs, don’t you?

Or buses. Or the el. Or bicycles. Or private cars. There’s tons of technologies that can transport us 26-plus miles. I just cannot figure out why people would subject themselves to the rigors of the more than three-to-five-hour ordeal that is a marathon.

Hell, if you want, you can hitchhike 26 miles.

Yet thousands, tens of thousands, for chrissakes hundreds of thousands of people run marathons each year. Take, for instance, the top eight marathons in the United States in 2023. Here are the total entrants or finishers for each that year:

  • New York — 51,402
  • Chicago — 48.398
  • Philadelphia — 34,000
  • Boston — 30,000
  • Honolulu — 25,000
  • Washington, DC (Marine Corps Marathon) — 23,000
  • Los Angeles — 22,000
  • Orlando (Walt Disney World Marathon) — 12,690

That’s a grand total of 246,490 poor, tortured souls who slogged their way through the streets, alleys, and paths of those cities. I could only find precise totals for New York, Chicago, Orlando, and Boston (that city places a limit on the number of entrants). As for the rest of them, who knows? Maybe marathon organizers look upon their final figures the way governments and historians view war dead, as grisly estimates. War, I would imagine, cannot be much more hellish than running 26-plus miles at a crack.

More than a thousand official marathons are run each year around the globe. That doesn’t even include half-marathons, which might seem a tad more sane than running a full one but, then again, that’s like saying the person who is splattered on the pavement at the foot of a skyscraper was half-pushed, half tripped off the roof. No matter, the gory result is the same.

More than 120,000 masochists applied to enter Chicago’s 2024 marathon, to be run Sunday, October 13th. Back when I lived in the artists’ enclave of East Pilsen on the city’s South Side, the marathon course went right past my house, the runners’ and their massed cheerers’ racket disturbing my beauty sleep at an ungodly hour. Don’t these damed fools know, I moaned every year, that I was out drinking last night? The nerve!

Anyway, I bring this up because a dear friend this past week informed me she is going to run in the Every Woman’s Marathon in Savannah, Georgia this November. She seemed to be in full possession of her wits and sanity — that is, up until the moment she broke the news to me. I looked at her as if she’d announced she’d drunk a bottle of Lysol™ the night before so as to cleanse her digestive system.

Of course, I didn’t say outright she’s nuts, although that’s certainly what I think now. I congratulated her and wished her well. She’s excited. She’s run marathons before, she told me, proudly. She must train for weeks, even months prior to each event. This is over and above her normal running routine.

I tried jogging a few times back in the mid-1980s. I quickly stopped it in deference to my hips, knees, lungs, heart, and mental health. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy running. I played baseball back then and loved sprinting around the bases and galloping in the outfield in pursuit of fly balls. The act of motoring through the field via my legs was exhilarating. Not only that, I was a bicycle freak in those days, riding even through the harshest of winters. In 2000, I pedaled in the 500-mile AIDS ride from Minneapolis to Chicago. But jogging seemed so pointless, such a waste of my time.

So, I’m not averse to actually using my muscles to get around on this planet. It’s just that…, well, I’m sensible — at least in that regard.

Natch, I’m loony in tons of areas of my life. I try to resist the urge to overindulge in countless ways but I succumb to excess and even addiction in many. But running 26-plus miles on a Sunday morning? Uh uh.

So, what the hell is it that drives these maniacs?

ABC News posed the Q to marathoners prior to the NYC event in 2022. One veteran replied “When it’s so tough, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, why did I put my body through this?'”

The BBC asked the same thing. A respondent, a veteran of nine marathons and author of a book for those wishing to get into the sport, called himself a “delayed gratification junkie.” Junkie being the key word here, I guess.

The fellow explained his irresistible attraction to marathoning: “”There is a surge to it you don’t get from other sports, because the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into a single marathon dwarfs that of an individual soccer game or tennis match. Can you push yourself through enough hell to finish is the only question.”

Hell. Like I said.

See? Even marathon runners think they’re loony.

Then comes the payoff, acc’d’g to the ABC report: “[T]he ‘runner’s high’ is no myth as the hormonal aspect of marathon running plays a big role in why people feel compelled to join in. Running is known for giving athletes a rush of endorphins, and crossing the finish line of an hourslong race can be described by some as euphoric.”

For my dough, a good, strong Bourbon cocktail does the trick.

But, that’s me. And who am I to want to deny anyone their deranged obsession?

You know what? I hope my dear friend does well in that Georgia marathon. I hope she runs her fastest ever such race which, I understand, is the big goal. If she does so, she can brag to me about it and I’ll slap her on the back and say Hooray!

Really, I’ll be happy for her.

But she’s still a loon.