EPISODE 340: LOVE WITHOUT GLOVES

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Last year when I interviewed Catholics who supported Donald Trump and also loved the Pope – an unexpectedly large cross-section of U.S. Catholics who voted in 2016 -- my biggest takeaway was that a lot of people felt our entire political system is broken. Dems, Republicans, what’s the difference, they all just fight and spin and fix nothing, so might as well vote for some other guy who will blow the whole thing up. Little did they know that was a literal thing that may still happen. Also, we did have health care for everybody for like five minutes. Anyway, Life, So Fun!

Looking at some of the people who won this year – and man, there’s some pretty inspiring folks in that group – I feel like I’m looking at a lot of people who felt exactly the same but went totally the opposite way. Yes, everything is broken, guess I better stand up and help my people get heard.

A couple years ago I got to intervene a bunch of Australian politicians for a script that will some day see the light of day. Whether it’ll be as a result of actually being a show that is on television or because I will be clutching it in my withered hands as they roll me to my grave (apparently I’m being taken to the grave in a wheelbarrow, it’s late, don’t ask me). Either way is fine, I’m not picky. (I really like this script.)

As I was talking to them, two things really hit me: First, many members keep one eye on becoming prime minister. Their system is much more fluid than ours: a sitting prime minister can get thrown out by his or her own fellow elected party members at any time, and really for any reason. (This has happened four times in the last seven years, actually.) So the allure of getting the big job is constant and close. It’s like that scene in Pulp Fiction where they open the briefcase and that golden light pours out. What’s the job actually like? Umm, who cares, it looks amazing.

The other thing that hit me, though, was how much some of the people I interviewed seemed to actually like just doing stuff for their constituents. Of course that’s how it’s supposed to be, right? You’re elected to represent and work for a specific group of people. (Right?) (Please?) (Bueller?)

But how often do you actually hear about that? No one tells stories of the way that Mitch McConnell helped get a dirt road paved in Lexington. Maybe there are stories like that, but usually it seems more like if there are those stories, they are awful. Like Mitch McConnell helped get a dirt road paved in Lexington so people in one part of town could avoid the part of town where the black people lived. Or Mitch McConnell protected five hundred jobs, and they are for small town bakers who have signed oaths never to serve anyone who is openly gay and in fact the whole operation is actually being funded by the Koch Brothers to get a case before the Supreme Court.

Not saying the Dems are better. Pork barrels, special interests, that’s some both party nonsense going on there.

But then I read about people like the first two Native American women ever elected to Congress, the first two Muslim women, the two youngest women ever elected to Congress, Texas' first two Latina Congresspersons, or the first African American woman to represent the state of Connecticut, who was a National Teacher of the Year in 2016, and I think man, maybe all the talk of despair is overrated. Maybe in the face of brokenness and ugliness we can also just choose to be better friends and neighbors to each other, if we want.

Minnesotan Ilhan Omar, the First Somali-American Congressperson.
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Snap judgment: For at least the next year, starting now, I’m going to use “she”/“her” as my default pronoun to represent groups of people. “He”/”him” has just way more than his fair share, you know? ++ Anne Friedman in her newsletter last week:

Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, one of those killed at Tree of Life on Saturday, from one of his former patients, Michael Kerr:

"In the old days, for HIV patients in Pittsburgh, he was the one to go to. Basically before there was effective treatment for fighting HIV itself, he was known in the community for keeping us alive the longest. He often held our hands (without rubber gloves) and always always hugged us as we left his office.

Dr. Rabinowitz always stood during the Jewish prayer for mourning, saying he had no children who would one day stand for him, so he stood for others who had no one to honor their memory. His entire community stood for him Sunday, and we stand for him, today and always.

Please stand with us in a moment of silence to honor Dr Rabinowitz, his fellow worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue: Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, David and Cecil Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger. We also remember Maurice Stallard and Vickie Jones, who were killed in a Louisville grocery store last week, after the shooter tried and failed to enter a black church nearby.

As the poem says, 'For as long as we live, they too will live, for they are now a part of us as, We remember them.' "

I keep coming back to this story about Dr. Rabinowitz because it's about love beating fear. He often held our hands without rubber gloves. That's what I'm trying to channel. I'm trying to figure out the love-based response to my fears about the outcome of these midterm elections, my fears that this administration has stoked so much hatred we'll never be able to recover as a nation, my fears for the safety of people I care about. In this moment, in my life, which acts are the equivalent of holding hands without rubber gloves?

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The crazy experience of being locked around a table with four other writers for what I thought was going to be five hours, then no, seven hours, then nine hours to do a final pass on a script about an African American lawman that some of us have been working on for more than five years, only to find that somehow somewhere in the midst of that escape room nightmare magic happened and the script got so much better. ++ My review of BEAUTIFUL BOY in two words: empathy beard. ++

Debra Haaland, Pueblo of Laguna,
one of the country's first Native American Congresswomen.
++ Eric Holthaus, a journalist who writes a lot of good thoughtful stuff about the environment, had a thing this week about how should we deal with climate change living in a country/world where so many politicians are for some reason degrading and/or eliminating the protections that we actually need if humanity is actually going to survive.

His answer: forget all the crazy out there. Stay within yourself. Dream.

“Starting today”, he writes, “use the next 727 days until the next presidential election to imagine what life would be like in a world that takes bold action on climate change — a society that prioritizes justice, equality, and the planet — and then devote some time each day to make that a reality.

He’s got a list of some possible “daily, practiced actions”, which include actually pretty unexpected and cool things like “Meet your neighbors” or “Support local news”. It’s kind of great.

It reminds me of this thing I saw on Twitter a couple months ago, a writer who set a goal to get twenty rejections in the next six months. That is, she wanted to really put herself out there; so she set a concrete goal for herself -- be told your work is unpublishable twenty times, minimum. Or on the other hand get some number approaching twenty things published. Which would also be cool, I guess, if success is your thing. ++

Click on the photo to expand imake the text legible. It's pretty great.
++ A depiction of LA that is absurdly inaccurate, but if you like to believe LA is a cult obsessed with self-care situated on a hell mouth, sure, go for your life.

Los Angeles is less of a region than a weather system, less of a city than a county, less of a metropolis than an 88-city nation-state. Canyons burn. Slopes slide. We're a megalopolis of cement, of roads that threaten to rupture beneath our feet. There's no safety net if you're not rich; people slip through the cracks constantly. It took me three and a half years to figure out one thing, perhaps the only thing I know for certain about L.A.: Anything can happen at any second. Which provokes a sense of doom or wild hope, depending on the day.

And you feel it in your bones, that sense of uncertainty. Los Angeles has been more of a myth than a reality at different times in history; now it's all reality. Nearly 58,000 county residents are homeless. L.A. has the country's largest jail system; it cages more people than any other city in the United States. And if you're lucky enough to avoid those two fates, our mild climate can still feel cold. You're never successful enough, never pretty enough. Our devotion to fitness lets our worship of the flesh seem less like narcissism (though it is) and more like noncompliance (with death). L.A. is a competitive place, full of transplants on the seek. And with each season comes a new diet ("any three-day cleanse for $90"), a new treatment to fix what's wrong (the "Viora Reaction," the "Vampire Facelift"). Self-help has become a habit in America, but it's pathological in Southern California.

Every Angeleno that read these two paragraphs then spent hours with friends debating which neighborhood this guy lives in. My bet is Encino.

Trust me, if you lived here you would think I’m really funny.
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Speaking of which, here is my journey watching BEAUTIFUL BOY via three Office GIFs.

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In other news, the problem with the Netflix TV show BODYGUARD so far is that there’s only one season of the Netflix TV show BODYGUARD so far.

Also, ICYMI, I did not enjoy the movie BEAUTIFUL BOY.

And if you want a story of Los Angeles that is really what Los Angeles is like, gather round.

++ LINKS ++

Reuters did a photo shoot of refugee children traveling with the immigrant caravan. Some pretty powerful stuff.

In an office in Japan, employees were not allowed to dress in your typical gaudy costumes for Halloween. But what they did instead is so much better.

SO. MUCH. BETTER.

Air Jordans were never a thing for me – probably I was just a little old when they became a thing, and definitely not that I had to have a friend in college teach me how to put the orange rubber ball through the metal circle. But if you like that sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you like.

Also, your style for the apocalypse is now available and ready for purchase. And while you’re waiting to checkout, take a few minutes to enjoy the new hit show everybody’s talking about, You Can’t Shoot Here.

“Show's over, folks. And didn't October do
A bang-up job?” -- November, a poem by Maggie Dietz

Don't let anyone convince you to abandon your joy. Just because the world is a mess doesn't mean you're a fool to have hope, or can't decide to look nice, or that there's anything wrong with eating nothing but Tikka Masala sauce for dinner.

If you start to have doubts, look for me at the next table. I'm the guy eating all the naan.

Here we go.