If you've learned nothing from your devoted and faithful reading of every single word I've written here over the last... however many years it's been since I started shouting into this void, it's that words like "integrity" and "follow-through" and "objectivity" and "brevity" and "comprehensibility" aren't really guiding watchwords as such, more things to be pleasantly surprised by if they ever occasionally occur. Like Halley's Comet, but less obviously sarcastic.
And if you think including "integrity" was too harsh, remember "follow-through" is two words, but I kept it in anyway. There's the level of commitment you're used to.
I'm not bragging when I say I don't watch Dancing with the Stars. I gave up on the idea of guilty pleasures or their inverse, shaming people for liking what they like, a few years ago now. I only make a single exception for modern country music, but I do that knowing safely there is nothing I'm ever going to say that's going to make a single bit of difference. It's your cosplay clusterfuck, white lady from Laguna Niguel wearing an $800 Neiman Marcus cowboy hat drunk-shouting along at the Jason Aldean or whoever concert about hay bailin' and dirt roads and drankin' cheap whiskaaaay or any of the other stuff you'd fire the housekeeper for if anyone you remotely knew ever saw her actually doing it.
I don't watch Dancing with the Stars because I suffer from second-hand embarrassment way too easily. The heart-swallowing cringe of watching people try that hard and still be terrible at a thing can in no way be cancelled out by the happy surprise of, I don't know, the drummer brother from Hanson knocking out a passable pasodoble 14 weeks in. If you can take it, fine, god bless. I'm going to be over here watching YouTube videos of rescue dogs getting bubble baths.
Whether you watch the show or not, the first round of Season 28(!) bled into the actual bullshit news cycle because the cast this year includes former Trump spokesweenie Sean Spicer. Some people are of the opinion that just because he spent a year or so going on television, saying things that are unmistakably untrue in the pursuance of a goal that included the erosion of the rule of law and the undermining of the basic assumptions of decency and political ethics in the United States, we shouldn't be so quick (or ever) to open our homes and televisions and television advertising dollars to any kind of redemption arc, especially for someone who thinks he did a great job. Whatever you think of it, DWTS is specifically designed to be frivolous and fun, everything that is the opposite of the man who on his first day on his previous job shouted at the assembled American press about the size of a crowd that wasn't there. It's already an uncomfortable fit.
But looking at the shirt Spicer was asked to wear as he danced his salsa or whatever the fuck, maybe "uncomfortable fit" was the point? After watching him dance, a judge said "It’s like you were being attacked by a swarm of wasps." Now, again, I didn't watch the show so I can't judge the tone this critique was being delivered in. Maybe that's supposed to be a compliment, like he transcended the limits of the studio and evoked a more pastoral space to which a wasp and his wasp friends might be drawn and then try to sting you to death because they mistook your ghastly shirt for a day-glo gladiolus. More likely it's just true: only one person is going to win this thing, so everyone else must be here for some other reason. Perhaps, maybe, to entertain America, William Hung-style, with their very specific in-ability to do the thing they're being asked to do?
It sounds cynical, but a Republican like Sean Spicer would understand. Corporations chase profits, check. The world is bettered by competition, where the strong thrive and carry on and the weak are awkwardly asked to leave and then do a post interview with Erin Andrews. That's evolution just as Darwin described it.
But no! Sorry, not Darwin! God, it's how God described it, because Darwin thinks we came from monkeys, which can't be true because Adam's bellybutton or something. After the controversy of his inclusion and the abject humiliation of his in-retrospect-entirely-predictably-shambolic performance on Night One, Spicer also predictably took the route of all Republicans who fail at anything these days and invoked the name of Yahweh the creator and Yahweh's little boy (on twitter, wouldn't you know):
The trouble is that, theologically, Spicer has now set a trap for himself in which he might also accidentally ensnare all of the Judeo-Christian cosmology. His premise is that he's going to stroll out there on the next opportunity and, with Jesus now on his side, he's going to dance with the dazzling grace of a person whose legs actually bend. The implication of course being if he fails, then THERE IS NO CHRIST.
You can't just invoke it and then pretend you didn't. Sean Spicer just walked himself into a sequel to Dogma. And I'm not sure I like his chances to save all of god's creation. I mean, if Jesus wanted him to be a good dancer, why would He wait until now to animate all of Sean Spicer's limbs after letting him flop and twitch like a boated mackerel out there on national television on Night One?
Is this just Jesus being Jesus, with his well-documented sense of humor based on the public humiliation of people who have shown themselves historically to be incapable of shame?
Or has Jesus already intervened because He sent us Lamar Odom to keep Sean Spicer safe? Truly mysterious ways. I guess we'll be able to tell for sure... whenever the next episode airs.
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*Russian bots count as a "public," right?
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