You Poisonous Snake!

Some weeks you just don't want the news cycle. Those are the weeks when there's so much going on in your actual life that you just to stretch out, clear some space and cherry-pick the bits of information you allow to drift out of the darkness in all directions and pollute your moment of easy breathing and bright light.

This has been one of those weeks. There's a bunch of churn and swirl, I'm happy to say most of it ranging from neutral to pretty frickin' good. On top of that, it's the week I'm supposed to be preparing myself for the inevitable disappointment that will be Justice League. A third movie featuring Superman that will almost definitely somehow cripple him with doubt and mood and tone in a clumsy attempt to address the narrative challenge of making an all-powerful character relatable AND not simply able to solve the central challenge in the first thirty seconds of the film. The Christopher Reeve films did it by making the stakes the lives of the people around him and scaling up the threats to match his abilities. Hell, they did it so well they even had to add a bunch of stuff* he can't actually do. These ones just made him sad all the time, and poorly lit.

Important though that is, it's not the only thing going on. There's work stuff and kid stuff and other stuff, none of which is bad, it just requires my attention. So I can't be out here policing who is and who isn't a monster. And yet, somehow, the news (as it has been since election day last year) is a parade of monster floats poorly made of chicken wire, sandpaper and earwax all held together by a broad and stunning palette of various types of animal feces. It's been twelve months and I just kind of want a day off.

But no, the brazenly inhuman election of an anti-human as our president has, in the lone positive development, completely flipped the script on male privilege and its tendency to excuse, obfuscate and perpetuate sexual violence against women, children, even other adult straight men. Outside a couple moments of accidental levity, which themselves usually end up being desperate and ultimately humiliating as much for the observers as anyone, it's been one catastrophe after another, up to and including the impending threat of nuclear war. That's all.

I am not complaining, even as the quickening chorus of outings claims yet another person I'd accidentally led myself to believe was one of the good ones. I've said before that racism, the foundation on which all of America is built, is only about 400 years old as an idea. Patriarchal misogyny, however, is way down at the root of all of western culture, dating back to the earliest shit anyone bothered to write down. It's such a given that no one in all this time had ever really been able to conceive that it was possible to directly challenge it. It started falling too late for Hillary Clinton, but maybe without her (still stinging and confusing) loss, none of this would have come together and a shitbag like Harvey Weinstein would still have a job.

The interesting thing will be to see how deep this spear of redress will pierce and whether it will be allowed to poke at the heart of this thing. Alabama will be an interesting test case. I've long joked that Alabama would elect a child molester before it would elect a Democrat to statewide office, at least since all the high-profile doctrinaire racists left for the Republican party after Lyndon Johnson started being sort of thoughtful about black folks. Well, now we have our chance to test literally that. I'll believe it when I see it, but think of the elements this has: an avowed Christian known for presenting defiance of all things other than his religion, even costing him his previous government positions; a sex scandal involving underage girls; lying robocalls designed to confuse the issue by injecting the unpopular northeast lame-stream media AND good ole fashioned Jew-baitin' anti-semitism. All we need is a little sprinkling of outright racism and it will be the most American thing that has ever occurred. And oh look! Yahtzee!

The tropes are old and a little confusing. I mean yeah, "the liberal media doesn't know us down here in real America, and that's in large part because they are Jews." Got it. It seems really outdated as most old-style anti-semites are, well, old. And Alabama isn't made ENTIRELY of old people. It sure seems like the younger, supposedly post-racial millennials would abhor this kind of tired rhetoric, but I always like to give ethnic animus the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure at some point, every generation seemed like it would be the last one to hold such stupid ideas, and yet somehow, those loving young people turned into old racists, replacing their dead parents in the self-winding social clockwork. Why would we think the new young people are any less susceptible to the same process? Are they stronger than a thousand years of anthropology somehow? Why, because Obama was president for what now seems like roughly 90 seconds?

I don't know what to think of Alabama. The patriotic Americans there seem like they're leaning toward defining me to be a regionalist anti-Southern bigot. Best case scenario is obviously they prove me wrong.

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*Not limited to levitation beams from his fingers, teleportation, creating a stone doppelganger of himself, amnesia-inducing kisses and a giant plastic S-shield he peels from his chest and throws at his enemies like a net.