EPISODE 344: THE APOSTLES' CREEP

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

This week Payless fooled people into paying $600 for its shoes, and Australia tricked the media into believing it is home to a giant, man-eating cow, and HBO just convinced millions of people to watch 30 seconds of fake ice being applied to Dungeons & Dragons figures and consider that a Game of Thrones preview, but it’s all good because the real gift of Christmastime is the friends you meet in lines along the way.

I feel like all my Australian friends are going to be annoyed at my crack about Knickers the Giant Man-Eating Cow. I just want them to know, I applaud their brutally brilliant send up of American cable news. We will literally believe anything if it is big and crazy enough (See: Current Occupant, Castle Dracula, 1 Pennsylvania Avenue), and more than that we will continue to promote it until an even bigger fictitious land mammal emerges (Joba the Seven Story Muskrat) or someone uncovers the unbelievably disgusting things Knickers has been writing on the internet. Because when you come right down to it, isn’t that what Walter Cronkite died for?

(You gotta admit, that cow is ridiculously big. Like Land of the Lost big. I would seriously be more confident about its actual existence if we were being informed by Sleestacks.

How does a cow like that even make it to that size without pretty much constant cable news bulletins about him? Especially one that lives on a diet of adult human flesh. It’s just so preposterous.)

So George Bush’s funeral was this week. And honestly, I can’t tell if it’s just been so long since a president died that I just don’t remember how these things go or this one really was kind of a little bit different, but it felt like a lot bigger deal than I would have expected.

In part I guess I've been surprised because he wasn't an especially well liked president. I’m not saying he was terrible, or that his presidency alone defines his legacy. Along with Jimmy Carter–another notably not very good president--Bush offered a real model of the tremendous amount of good you can do once you've left office.

But many of the great things written and said about Bush, much like the eulogies given for John McCain a few months ago, seem to be as much about attacking the current resident of the White House, Now with Blood Red Trees! as anything else.

It’s interesting to think about how we remember former presidents. None of them have clean hands; all of them are messy combination of great aspirations and clay feet. But personally I’d rather we explore that than paint it all over with “American Hero” logos. Facing a president’s mistakes or bad choices is a way of facing our own complicated history and learning from it.

For instance, Bush like Reagan before him was not interested in the AIDS crisis until it proved to be affecting more than gay men. Which was really awful. And that prejudice was not simply his, but that of many Americans.

Thank God our attitudes towards the LGBTQ community and those with HIV/AIDS have changed; but then you look at how we’re treating refugees, undocumented immigrants, and frankly most Latinos in our country and it seems like a pretty similar dynamic. Would it not help us to consider that parallel, to try and learn from George Sr.’s and our own past mistakes? Maybe not at the funeral – God no – but at some point shouldn’t we be asking ourselves, why do we keep insisting on the scapegoating? What is that doing for us? And what is it doing to us?

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There have been some great pieces on Bush the last week. I really loved this New York Times piece documenting his friendship with James Baker and Baker’s care for him in his final days.

There’s also the very well publicized story of the letter Bush left for Clinton upon leaving the White House, which speaks volumes about his good qualities and an important way in which he has continued to inspire those came after him.

There’s also this article by Maureen Dowd, who covered the White House during the Bush years. It’s a fascinating piece in that it’s very much an ode to Bush, but if you push through some of Dowd’s adoration, she’s actually presenting a lot of somewhat uncomfortable stuff.

Probably my favorite piece, though, came from Anne Helen Petersen, who reflected on this phenomenon of presidential hagiography.

Politicians are challenging figures to eulogize — they are people, and thus have family and others who react to their deaths as one would react to any other death. (When I say eulogize, I don’t mean the actual eulogy at the burial; I mean how they’re eulogized within public discourse). But in addition to their status as humans, politicians are also symbols: the cumulative sum of the actions as leaders. To remember them solely in terms of how they interacted with the powerful and the privileged, without consideration of how they ignored or elevated “the least of these,” to quote the Book of Matthew, who were most acutely affected by their decisions as a leader, strikes me as both ahistorical and incomplete.

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Barack Obama was not a perfect president, either; far from it. But as pictures like these from past White House Christmases pop up in my social media feed I keep thinking my life would be better right now if the Obama Family released a demo of "White Christmas." ++ I realized this week that the reason Angelenos have so much apprehension about rain is it really has nowhere to go here. I mean, there is an ocean to our west, but the water just seems to pool on our streets. I saw people writing today about their neighborhood streets being flooded; and while it really did well and truly rain a considerable amount the last 24 hours, it’s still nothing like the amount of water that you’d need to shut down a Chicago suburban street. I don’t know if it’s our sewer system here, the way our streets are set up or something about our land itself, but we just don’t have the infrastructure for much water. We are the Atlanta-Got-Two-Inches-of-Snow-and-is-Now-Closed-Til-Spring of rain.

I came into the week having just turned in a bunch of big stuff, and so I’ve taken the week to mostly brainstorm around some projects that have been patiently waiting. Every year at this time, actually, I daydream about a screenplay I want to write about a middle school Christmas pageant. And I take notes and sometimes I write scenes and then it’s January and snow is no longer pretty and who wants to think any more about Christmas.

But this year I’m really trying to flesh the thing out, and it’s been kind of a rollercoaster, which is weird when you’ve just parked outside your favorite comic book shop and you suddenly become an emotional wreck at an idea for the script that moves you, and also hopefully a good sign.

(Or it’s an indication I need more sleep. As my novice director always told us, you’re more tired than you know.)

There’s snow in the mountains to the northeast of us, which has left our wet town also remarkably cold, especially once the sun slips beneath the horizon. But that’s perfect for Advent, which is generally my favorite Catholic liturgical season. Waiting in the darkness, I feel you. In fact, I think I could use about six months of you.

I’m trying to look around more, be present to the moment, savor the lights and the chill and the season. But I suspect I’m going to get to Christmas and be like Punxsutawney Phil, pop my head out of my groundhog cave for a moment and then withdraw to wrap myself in another six weeks of sweet and melancholy darkness. ++ LINKS ++

Today in Is a Rose Still a Rose:

If you believe an action figure you've been praying to is St. Anthony,
Does it matter if someone else tells you it isn't?
(My Answer: Who's not to say St. Anthony was not a Half-Elf?)

Last week also saw the death of screenwriter Gloria Katz, who co-wrote American Graffitiwith her husband and then worked as a script doctor on George Lucas’ next film, this weird little microbudget scifi project he did called Star Wars. Katz’s work was a lot around Princess Leia; she thought the character needed to be more smart and funny 50s heroine and less the blonde bombshell Lucas had envisioned. Thank God she did.

Think piece of the week: How Ghostbusters 2 explains the world today; it is kind of unbelievable.

Kids all over Australia walk out to protest the government’s decision to allow a new, massive coal mine. Because kids are awesome.

SNL this week did a sort of Ken Burns’ spoof of a guy on the front lines of World War I writing letters to his wife Margaret. It’s both immediately funny and goes to wonderfully crazy places. Claire Foy is perfection.

And lastly, an oldie but a goodie: I dare you to witness the joy Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy takes every time he makes a joke and not be delighted. (Vanessa Bayer did a interview with Vulture’s jokes podcast last year about developing Jacob; it is also wonderful.)

This season seems to thrive on telling us we have so much else to do than whatever it is we're doing right now. And maybe we do, sometimes. But is it really going to be a catastrophe if it doesn't all get done? Don't be afraid to push back. Forget the onrushing future; I'm trying to do the same. Now. Here. This.