EPISODE 331: SOME DAY WE’LL ALL BE TOGETHER ONCE MORE

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

A few hours late today, and the episode's a hodge podge. Sorry about that; miles to go and all that. I’ll be off the next two weeks hiding from newspapers and flying over enormous bodies of water.

Kelly Marie Tran, Rose Tico from the most recent Star Wars film, writes this week about the shame that comes with growing up different, and how online harassment helped her face itonce and for all.

It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them.

Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.

Meanwhile Australian Actor and Scarf Neck Model Guy Pearce. tries to understand our Constant Online Outrage.

Everybody has something in themselves they feel is fragile, delicate, misunderstood, not heard, and we want that part of ourselves to be heard. We’re not relating to each other, we’re just all going: ‘I need to be heard now and I’m going to be offended until I’m heard.’ And if you cast that person in that role: ‘I’m not heard, therefore I’m offended, therefore that’s wrong, end of conversation.’ What’s happening to us? It’s like we’re all functioning in the world as if it’s road rage and these are our cars [he picks up his phone] and we’re behind the safety glass of Twitter and all that stuff.

Speaking of Australia, this has been a crap week here, with their fifth prime minister ousted since 2010 – that is, not voted out of office by the people of Australia, but pushed out of power by members of their own party. The guy they've just put in designed a pretty horrendous refugee policy; half his party voted against him; and a poll this week found that of all the candidates he was the least popular with Australians, with just 8.6% preferring him as prime minister.

AND despite all that that country is still about 3000% more functional than the United States. #GoodTimes

(Australians, if you’re feeling low, this is for you.)

Speaking of the United States, apparently one of the more unexpected casualties of a world worse than your nightmares? No one wants snarky late night television.

Or at least Netflix doesn’t. Tell me that David Letterman wouldn’t still be storming the castle.

(I will say, however, I definitely could do with a lot less politically snarky SNL. If they never feature the president again it will still be too soon.)

I know this Alexa ad is totally fictional. And yet I believe everything it suggests about Amazon is true.

I just dropped Amazon Prime. Screw that Pay you to deliver my niece’s birthday present in two days and then have it not arrive for days. It was nice while it lasted Amazon, but I'll keep the cash now, thanks.

And speaking of craziness that we believe for no good reason, the whole subliminal advertising makes you buy more soda craze was made up, and so was the idea that lemmings rush off a cliff (weirdly, by Disney).

On the other hand, if you want to know what well and truly actually does make California so special, here it is: our politicians put the state first.

The core principle of the Party of California is that the state — its history and heritage, its environment, its economy and, above all, the well-being of its people — is worth imagining, worth struggling for,” wrote the historian Kevin Starr, who popularized the phrase. “When things get politically intractable, as they frequently do, everyone is entitled to appeal to the Party of California as the premise and matrix of political agreement.

Also, that the New York Times would print a story that gets California so right is like a Christmas miracle. (Turns out the writer is actually a former writer and editor for the Los Angeles Times.) The next time you see a story about Los Angeles in the NY Times, maybe play a game of bingo.

And speaking of great LA writers who also write for the other coast, LA music critic (and LMU journalism teacher) Evelyn McDonnell wrote this great piece about Aretha Franklin.

“Think” has rightly been interpreted as one of the artist’s definitive feminist anthems. Ironically, her husband and manager Ted White, whom she later accused of abuse, is credited as a co-writer, but the singer’s sister Carolyn has said the song was all hers. It proffers a powerful idea, a moral philosophy that Aretha might have learned from one of her father’s legendary sermons: In the act of consciously and conscientiously loving one another, people attain the transcendent state of freedom.

Lastly, the New York Times also ran this week a brilliant analysis of what made some of Robin Williams’ comedy so powerful. (Hint: It’s his son.)

And my college-aged nephew and niece both left for college on the same day, and I’m pretty sure that was intentional and mean. And also a great way to break your parents.

It’s well past midnight and I’m well and the lids are getting heavy. I leave you with this: earlier this week I had an appointment that I mixed up, and I suddenly found myself near the Jesuit cemetery with an hour to kill.

So I’m standing there before these legends of the Australian society, a few of whom I've been lucky enough to know, and I'm thinking about just how crazy everything has gotten.

And for just a second it’s like I can see these problems, the Church and politics and everything else, from these deceased Jesuits' point of view. And it was so clear that it’s all going to work out. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in my lifetime, but the Church is going to find a new life and eventually the insane blood letting will end in Canberra and who knows maybe Twitter will shut down the accounts of politicians that suggest nuclear annihilation and bully school children. (Boy don’t we have fun?)

Have a good couple weeks. As some like to say out here, don’t let the bastards get you down. It’s going to be okay.