House Republicans have put forth a proposal to rename Dulles International Airport after former (and perhaps future) President Trump. The bill is meeting with the expected braying in the mainstream media.
As an American citizen, there are many issues that concern me at present…
Our government, and the clownish governments that rule the various countries of the rest of NATO, are rushing toward World War III with Russia. They are risking all our lives over the question of which flag flies over land that was long Russian territory, anyway.
The deficit continues to grow at an unsustainable rate. Washington is no longer burning through our money. It’s burning through the money of Americans who won’t be born before all presently living Americans are dead.
Biden has made us a laughingstock and a near-failed state with his mismanagement of the border. It’s become a cliché, but yes: the only border Biden cares about is the one between Ukraine and Russia.
Every week, a foolish new “woke” initiative spews from the White House. These range from forcing us to buy electric vehicles that no one wants, to declaring a special day of visibility for Americans who self-identify as cocker spaniels.
The country is a mess, to put it mildly.
Amid all of this, renaming Dulles International Airport after Donald Trump—or anyone, for that matter—would not even make the bottom tier of a thousand-item priority list.
There is no monopoly on foolishness in our government at present. The only real question is: which band of fools will bring about collapse first, if permitted free rein? The Democratic Party is doing its best to destroy us in any number of ways, but we ought not get cocky about the GOP. Case-in-point: this new initiative to rename Dulles International Airport, an item as unwanted as Joe Biden’s electric cars.
One of the dominant players in the AI audiobook narration field recently offered access to its platform at a deep discount.
As an author, it behooves me to keep up with such things, even when I have my doubts. I have long been skeptical of the much-ballyhooed AI panacea. But I thought I should try AI narration before I completely wrote it off.
And like I said: the company was offering a deep discount.
I gave the whiz-bang AI narration platform a try. It does indeed output a narration from text.
Amadeus, the biographical drama about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the mid-1980s. Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, and Elizabeth Berridge, Amadeus brought the famed 18th-century composer and his times to life.
Amadeus remains one of my favorite movies of all time. But when I saw it for the first time, as a teenager in the 1980s, I was inspired: I had a sudden desire to learn more about classical music, or at least about Mozart.
This was more than a little out of character for me at the time. As a teenager, my musical tastes ran the gamut from Journey to Iron Maiden, usually settling on Rush and Def Leppard.
So I read a Mozart biography. I was already an avid reader, after all. Then it came time to listen to the actual music. That’s when my inspiration fell flat.
I found that Mozart the man was a lot more interesting than his music. At least to my then 17-year-old ears. Nothing would dethrone rock music, with its more accessible themes and pounding rhythms.
Almost 40 years later, I still prefer rock music. In fact, I still mostly prefer the rock music I listened to in the 1980s.
Recently, however, I took another dive into classical music.
Classical music, like popular, contemporary music, is a mixed bag. Some of it is turgid and simply too dense for modern ears. Some pieces, though, are well worth listening to, even if they were composed in another era.
Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” is one such piece. For the longest time, I mistakenly assumed that this arrangement was written for the 1986 Vietnam War movie, Platoon, in which it is prominently figured.
I was wrong about that. “Adagio for Strings” was composed in 1938, long before either Platoon or the Vietnam War.
“Adagio for Strings” is practically dripping with pathos. It is the perfect song to listen to when you are coping with sadness or tragedy. This music simultaneously amplifies your grief and gives it catharsis. You feel both better and worse after listening.
“Adagio for Strings” was broadcast over the radio in the USA upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. It was played at the funeral of Albert Einstein ten years later. The composition was one of JFK’s favorites; and it was played at his funeral, too, in 1963.
Most of the time, though, you’ll be in the mood for something more uplifting. That will mean digging into the oeuvre of one or more of the classical composers.
While the best-known composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc.) all have their merits, I am going to steer you toward Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) instead.
Dvorak was born almost a century after Mozart and Beethoven, and longer than that after Bach. To my philistine ear, Dvorak’s music sounds more modern, while still falling within the realm of the classical.
Antonin Dvorak
I would recommend starting with Symphony Number 9, Aus der Neuen Welt (“From the New World”). This is arguably Dvorak’s most accessible work, and my personal favorite at present. Symphony Number 9 contains a lot of moods. It takes you up and down, and round again.
This is not the story of an older adult turning away from the pop culture of his youth for more sophisticated fare. Far from it. Dvorak is not going to replace Def Leppard on my personal playlist. Bach and Mozart have not supplanted Rush and AC/DC.
But time has made me more musically open-minded. Almost 40 years after I was inspired by the movie Amadeus, I have, at long last, developed a genuine appreciation for classical music.
But that is a qualified appreciation, for an art form that I still prefer in measured doses.
Not far from where I live, there is a stretch of Ohio State Route 125 that has been dubbed Dead Man’s Curve.
The spot is just a few miles from my house, in fact. I’ve been by there many times.
According to the urban legend, if you drive this section of rural highway a little after 1 a.m., you might see the faceless hitchhiker. From a distance, this male figure may look relatively normal. Once you get close, though, you’ll see that he has no face.
Sometimes the hitchhiker isn’t content to stand there by the side of the road and watch you. There have been reports of the phantom actually attacking cars.
Creepy, right?
Yeah, I think so, too….
Dead Man’s Curve on Ohio State Route 125 has a long and macabre history. Route 125 is the main road that connects the suburbs and small towns east of Cincinnati with the city. But much of the road (including Dead Man’s Curve) was originally part of the Ohio Turnpike, which was built in 1831. (Andrew Jackson was president in 1831, just to put that date in perspective.)
That section of the Ohio Turnpike was the scene of many accidents (some of them fatal), even in the horse-and-buggy days. The downward sloping curve became particularly treacherous when rain turned the road to mud. Horses and carriages would sometimes loose their footing, sending them over the adjacent hillside.
In the twentieth century, the Ohio Turnpike was paved and reconfigured into State Route 125. In 1968 the road was expanded into four lanes.
As part of the expansion, the spot known as Dead Man’s Curve was leveled and straightened. (As a result, the curve doesn’t look so daunting today…unless you know its history.) This was supposed to be the end of “Dead Man’s Curve”.
But it wasn’t.
In 1969, there was a horrible accident at the spot. The driver of a green Roadrunner—traveling at a speed of 100 mph—slammed into an Impala carrying five teenagers. There was only one survivor of the tragic accident.
Shortly after that, witnesses began to report sightings of the faceless hitchhiker during the wee hours. (The hitchhiker is said to be most active during the twenty-minutes between 1:20 and 1:40 a.m.) There have also been reports of a ghostly green Roadrunner that will chase drivers late at night.
Oh, and Dead Man’s Curve remains deadly, despite the leveling and straightening done in 1968. In the five decades since the accident involving the Roadrunner and the Impala, around seventy people have been killed there.
Is there any truth to the legend of Dead Man’s Curve?
I can’t say for sure. What I can tell you is that I’ve heard many eyewitness accounts from local residents who claim to have seen the hitchhiker. (Keep in mind, I live very close to Dead Man’s Curve, and it’s a local topic of discussion and speculation.) Almost none of these eyewitnesses have struck me as mentally imbalanced or deceitful.
I know what your last question is going to be: Have I ever driven Dead Man’s Curve between 1:20 and 1:40 a.m. myself?
Uh, no. But perhaps I’ll get around to it someday, and I’ll let you know in a subsequent blog post!
One day in the early spring of 2018 I traveled to a rural part of southern Indiana to attend to some family matters. (I live in Ohio, but I’m half Hoosier. My dad grew up in nearby Lawrenceburg.)
I spent most of that day in Switzerland County. You’ve probably never been there. Switzerland County, Indiana looks nothing like Switzerland. In early spring, that part of Indiana, along the Ohio River, can look a little bleak.
(Portions of the 1988 Molly Ringwald/Andrew McCarthy movie, Fresh Horses, were filmed in Switzerland County. McCarthy said of the area, “There’s the whole starkness up there; it helped the mood of the movie.” )
Southern, rural Indiana is home to several large casinos. I ordinarily have no interest in gambling venues. I ate lunch at the nearby Belterra Casino that day, though, because…there weren’t many other dining options in the vicinity.
My visit to the casino got me thinking: What if a young couple in debt visited the casino in a make-or-break effort to get ahead financially? What if they were lured there by a special offer? $300 worth of ‘free’ gaming chips?
What if their beginner’s foray into gambling went horribly wrong, and they fell further in the hole? Then suppose that a narcotics kingpin offers them an alternative plan…another way to get ahead.
All they have to do is run an errand for him. What could possibly go wrong?
That’s the premise behind my 2020 casino novel, Venetian Springs. Set in a fictional version of Belterra Casino, Venetian Springs is a story of two down-on-their-luck high school teachers who succumb to the lure of easy money. They soon discover that easy money doesn’t exist. But this is a lesson that may cost them both their lives.
The other day, a reader asked me what I thought of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005).
Yes, I read the book; and I saw the 2011 movie starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.
Despite the name, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is mostly the story of a polyamorous middle-age journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who tracks down Nazis with the occasional help of Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous young lady with the dragon tattoo.
Blomkvist is a stand-in for the novel’s author. Stieg Larsson (1954-2004) was a left-of-center Swedish journalist. Larsson flirted with the radical leftist movements of the 1960s at a very young age. He declared himself a Marxist at the age of 14.
To his credit, Larsson later disavowed outright Marxism. He longed, though, to wage a righteous battle against European Nazism. Never mind that most authentic European Nazis were in nursing homes and graveyards by the time he reached full adulthood.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo suggests a preoccupation with rightwing conspiracies. Not that there’s much of a risk in Larsson’s native land. Sweden, on the contrary, is one of the most “woke” countries on earth. The Swedes pioneered the use of the self-consciously “gender neutral” pronoun half a decade before such absurdities reached the English-speaking world.
There are also the cartoonish, over-the-top depictions of misogyny in the book and the movie. The original title of the novel was, Män som hatar kvinnor (“Men Who Hate Women”).
Was Larsson kidding? No, he wasn’t. Even in Sweden, though, there was enough common sense in commercial publishing to avoid saddling a book with an ideological title like that.
If you read the book and/or watched the movie, you’ll find that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is fantasy fulfillment for its author. Mikael Blomkvist saves Lisbeth Sanders from the bad guys. He doesn’t really want to sleep with his much younger heroine. (According to the book, Blomkvist has always preferred middle-age women to “young girls” in their twenties.) But the twenty-something Salander comes on to him. So how can he say no?
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, even though I saw it for what it was: fantasy fulfillment for a politically left-leaning journalist who had entered midlife crisis territory.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo isnot a bad novel, despite it’s flaws. By all means read and enjoy it. Just don’t take it literally; and realize that the book’s author, Stieg Larsson, had multiple axes to grind when he sat down at the keyboard.
Suburban parents nowadays worry obsessively about their kids catching something. Some parents even carry around little packages of sanitary wipes, so that they can sterilize surfaces in advance of their progeny. As if an American kid is going to catch Ebola at a birthday party.
This obsession with a germ-free childhood is a recent invention. GenXers grew up in an environment in which germ theory was understood, but not always given much consideration.
It was not uncommon in the 1970s to see kids passing around and drinking from the same bottle of soda. Maybe someone wiped the mouth of the bottle clean before they handed it to you…but probably not. Nor could you easily object. To express too much fastidiousness about the casual exchange of bodily fluids would have been regarded as fussy, especially among boys.
The childhood tradition of becoming “blood brothers” was mostly obsolete by the 1970s, but it happened. In that era before AIDS, no one worried about mixing blood, either.
We were sometimes told to “wash our hands”, but that carried its own dangers. School restrooms were unhygienic by today’s standards. They were often equipped with creaky cloth towel cabinets, in which the same towel roll was recycled again and again. (Twenty-first-century versions of the cloth roll towel cabinet are reasonably sanitary, I am told. But the ones you would typically find in a public school restroom in 1978? Not so much.)
Was this lax approach to juvenile hygiene a good thing, or a bad thing? Arguably the proof is in the pudding. The majority of us made it to adulthood without expiring from any communicable diseases. I am now in my mid-50s, and I rarely get a cold. So I suppose there is something to be said for naturally acquired immunity.
I don’t understand the things that people hype nowadays. Or the things they spend good money on. Maybe I’m out of touch. And maybe the rest of the world has gone crazy.
This tale begins with Ebanie Bridges, a 36-year-old professional boxer.
Now, before you ask, I have nothing against female boxers, or female athletes in general. Not that I’m a spectator of them, mind you. But then, I don’t watch men’s sports, either. (Hint: if you’re watching more athletics than you’re participating in, you’re probably in danger of becoming a couch potato.)
The aforementioned Ebanie Bridges was recently paid £250,000 just to start an OnlyFans account. That’s a lot of money, sure. But given the number of men plunking down cash on that autoporning site in recent years, why not?
For a mere $12 per month, the desperate, sex-starved male can now view shots of Ms. Bridges in lingerie, overflowing with tattoos and cleavage. Hoo-hah. Grab your willies, guys, your computer mouses, and your credit cards.
But that’s not all. It gets even worse. According to an article in The Sun, Bridges regularly receives “odd requests from ‘paypigs’” who askher for “gnarly things, such as her dirty socks and bathwater.”
The sad part: I have no doubt that men really are requesting such items, and paying good money for them.
I’ve read those reports of testosterone declining. The average 20-year-old man is much less manly than his grandfather was at 40, or even 50. But have millions of red-blooded men now been reduced to…OnlyFans paypigs? Apparently so.
For most of my life, I didn’t consider myself an “alpha male” in the traditional sense of that word. But such yardsticks are relative. So many men have now lowered the bar to such a degree, that even I have reached alpha male status by default.
Those pathetic shells of men who comprise the subscriber base of OnlyFans…they who plunk down their cash not for sex, even, but for onanistic pleasures on a computer screen.
While giving a speech at a National Rifle Association event in Indianapolis a few days ago, Mike Pence was booed as he took the microphone. A very awkward moment, to be sure.
The 2024 Republican hopeful and former VPOTUS is now scrambling to carry out damage control, as one might expect. But his case is likely hopeless. As a Republican candidate for president, it’s hard to do worse than that.
In these hyper-partisan times, politicians get booed, harassed, and hounded all the time, of course. But Mike Pence was not driven from the grounds of an American university by shaggy, leftwing student hooligans with weight and hygiene issues. He was not harried by climate change fanatics or frothing pro-abortion fetishists screeching “My body, my choice!” Mike Pence was booed at the podium of an NRA event not only in his home state, but in the state where he used to be the Republican governor.
Mike Pence would likely be a long shot even if our political environment were, well…saner. He has a notable charisma problem, and that’s been a major handicap for any national candidate since the advent of televised debates.
Commercial television has been around since the late 1940s. Political debates, though, did not become a televised phenomenon until 1960, when Kennedy debated Nixon. Prior to their televised debate, Nixon was ahead in the polls. But Nixon’s sweaty, awkward, twitchy performance gave the youthful, relaxed, and photogenic Kennedy a solid advantage. We might say that JFK was our first president to be elected by television.
Mike Pence’s first obstacle, then, is that he can’t run for president in 1920 or 1948, when the charisma of a national candidate was much less of a factor.
Pence’s more immediate handicap, though, is that he is a moderate, at a moment in time when the most activist voters of both parties prefer extremist whackos. For evidence of this trend, I need mention only two names: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
What will the general election of 2024 bring? If the current electorate gets what it deserves, we’ll face another stark choice between the bumbling incompetence of Joe Biden (with all his loony, far-left camp followers coming along for the ride), and the temperamental volatility of Donald Trump.
We’ll see. But one thing is for certain, where the next U.S. presidential election is concerned: Mike Pence will not be anywhere near the podium on Inauguration Day 2025. He will not last long in the Republican nomination race of 2024, either.
One of the nostalgia-based Twitter feeds I follow recently posed the question: “Who was your celebrity crush when you woke up on your 13th birthday? I’ll start.”
The Twitter feed’s author then posted a vintage poster of Christie Brinkley from the early 1980s. If you’re of a certain age, you’ve no doubt seen this one before: Brinkley clad in a one-piece blue swimsuit, her facial expression maddeningly sultry, her blowing hair accentuating her in all her early twentysomething feminine glory.
Who was your celebrity crush when you woke up on your 13th birthday? I’ll start: pic.twitter.com/xcGa7g48lP
This got me thinking about the whole concept of celebrity crushes, why some people get them, and why I have always been more or less immune to them.
Not that I’m above tilting at romantic windmills. When I was a freshman in high school, I developed an aching crush on a senior girl at my school who was also a popular cheerleader. Talk about hopeless causes.
And it actually got worse from there. From my adolescence through my early adulthood, I subscribed to the Groucho Marx school of romance. Marx, you might recall, once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” There was a time in my life when my interest in a member of the opposite sex burned in inverse proportion to her interest in me, or lack thereof. (Fortunately, I have learned to put that one behind me.)
But I have always confined my interests to people who were physically present within my immediate environs, and at least theoretically attainable. I never fixated on anyone whom I knew only from television, movies, magazines, the radio, or the Internet. What would be the point of getting worked up about someone who lives on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world?
I have, at times, become briefly infatuated by the combination of an actress/character. I am part of the generation that grew up watching the Brady Bunch in rerun syndication. I suppose I would be lying if I denied that I had a pre-sexual, boyhood crush on Jan and Marcia Brady, played by Eve Plumb and Maureen McCormick. But even then, I recognized that these characters were contrivances, not real life. To romanticize them overly much was delusional.
Maureen McCormick as Marcia Brady, circa 1970
Later on, in my teenage years, I found myself drawn to Diane Franklin’s innocent, doomed Patricia Montelli in Amityville II: The Possession (1982). But I also saw Franklin portray a manipulative schemer in The Last American Virgin, which came out the same year.
I will admit that Molly Ringwald’s interpretation of Jewel in Fresh Horses (1988) stirred a little mini-crush in me for the 105 minutes of that film. By that time, though, I had already seen Ringwald in a variety of roles. The illusion ended as soon as the closing credits rolled.
Celebrity crushes seem to cross lines of both gender and generation. Consider those film clips from the 1950s, which show young women of the Eisenhower era going absolutely nuts over Elvis. When I was in grade school, a conspicuous number of women in my class maintained fantasy relationships with Shaun Cassidy and Scott Baio. Perhaps your twenty-something daughter once had a thing for…what was his name…Justin Beaver?
In more recent years, I’ve read stories about Taylor Swift’s stalkers, and the lengths to which they will go in order to get a few minutes of facetime with the constantly hyped and too-omnipresent singer. In their throes of futile devotion, they send her both love letters and death threats. One broke into Swift’s New York City apartment twice in one year. Police found the man sleeping in her bed, like a demented Goldilocks.
I would have no interest in meeting Swift, let alone turning her into a quest of some kind. I’m baffled by the legions of male and female Taylor Swift fans who self-identify as “Swifties”.
But Rolling Stone identifies the typical Taylor Swift devotee as “Millennial, suburban, and white.” I’m a Gen Xer. The oldest Millennials were born when I was in high school. I’m about 15 to 25 years older than the typical Taylor Swift fan.
And indeed, most of Taylor Swift’s overly ardent male fans seem to be Millennials, too. Come to think of it, I have never heard a man of my generation make so much as a wistful remark about Ms. Swift.
There is, however, an online legion of men my age who hold long-simmering crushes on Diane Franklin. This seems to come up every time the actress (who is amazingly humble and good-natured for a “Hollywood person”) sits for an interview.
You need only peruse some of the 1980s- and horror-themed podcasts on YouTube to get a grasp of this. Every middle-age male podcaster who interviews Diane Franklin seems incapable of not telling her that he had a teenage crush on her back in the 80s. As if she hadn’t already guessed that.
She always smiles unflappably, and waits for her interviewer to move on. All of them eventually do, but sometimes after belaboring the point a bit too long.
Franklin was, indeed, one of the crush-worthy young female stars of the 1980s, starring not just in the aforementioned Amityville II and The Last American Virgin, but also in Better Off Dead (1985). She even had a role in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). No, I never had a crush on her; but I do remember her as an actress.
About two years ago, I decided to become more active than usual on Twitter. I looked around for various 80s pop culture-related Twitter accounts to follow, and this inevitably led me to Diane Franklin, who has a presence on the platform.
Franklin has a mid-sized account, of about 10K followers. I skimmed through her most recent tweets, and I noticed that she was interacting with some of her followers.
“Oh, what the heck?” I thought.
I followed Diane Franklin and sent her a tweet. She tweeted back. I tweeted back. And so on.
Then it struck me. Diane Franklin and I were actually having a conversation (though it was doubtless more enthusiastic on my end). If only that 14-year-old version of myself, circa 1982, could have seen this!
She may have glanced at my Twitter profile. I look my age, and my tweets would have revealed me as someone old enough to have seen her 1980s oeuvre when all those movies appeared for the first time in the cinemas.
Then I paused, and considered what I was doing. I suddenly realized that I was in imminent danger of becoming one of THEM: one of those now middle-age, formerly teenage Gen X males who still carry quixotic torches for Diane Franklin.
“Oh, no! This is weird!” I shouted. “This is creepy. I’m not going to do this!…Or at least: I’m not going to do it anymore.”
I quietly deleted all my tweets addressed to Franklin, and then I unfollowed her. I’m sure she barely noticed my disappearance. She probably didn’t notice at all.
I’ll never approach Diane Franklin on Twitter again, needless to say, nor any other female celebrity. That was a one-time lapse. (I’m not much for social media, anyway.)
I still have fond memories of Diane Franklin’s films, of course. I still appreciate her acting skills and good public graces.
But I have this rule: “No celebrity crushes.” I’m not going within even a hundred miles of such make-believe and self-delusional territory, not even for a celebrity who was gracious enough to communicate with me, and not even within the make-believe world of Twitter.
One does not need to view Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg with particularly high regard (and I don’t) in order to agree with him when he has a legitimate point. Remember that old saw about the stopped clock: it gives the correct time twice per day.
As Buttigieg recently told CNN, Southwest Airlines has suffered “a complete meltdown” of the system.
Most airlines had difficulty during last week’s epic snowstorm, which unluckily coincided with Christmas. But Southwest has cancelled thousands of flights for Wednesday and Thursday of this week, leaving thousands of travelers stranded.
As an excuse, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan has stated, “our network is highly complex.” Bob Jordan is compensated to the tune of $3 million per year. At that level of compensation, he and his highly paid management team should have been untangling the complexity proactively, before something like this happened.
Pete Buttigieg, like Mighty Mouse in a fit of outrage, has promised that he will hold the airline accountable. He has also stated that Southwest should offer stranded refunds and reimbursement of expenses incurred.
Such expectations are fair enough, but the market will likely be the one to hold Southwest accountable. I certainly wouldn’t want to plan a trip with the airline now. Would you?
Airlines, collectively, are the Evil Empire of the travel world. A number of years ago, I was returning from a two-week business trip in Japan when my final Delta flight from Detroit to Cincinnati was cancelled.
Delta offered no real reason for the flight cancellation. Nor did they offer reimbursement to whatever expenses I might have incurred. On the contrary, the Delta ticketing agent was snippy with me when I asked if I could at least retrieve my checked luggage, which (thanks to those “complex” airline systems) was already on its way to Cincinnati without me.
As chance would have it, I was able to hitch a ride with a group of people from my company who had already secured one of the few rental cars available. I was home four hours later.
The next day, a Saturday, I had to drive to the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport to pick up my checked luggage. Needless to say, Delta didn’t offer to reimburse me for my gas.
That episode occurred about ten years ago. In more recent years, we have been treated to numerous reports of “airline passengers behaving badly”, facilitated by the ubiquity of cell phone video cameras.
There is never an excuse for acting like an ass in public, even if you’ve been provoked. But as a longtime flyer (going all the way back to the 1990s), I can tell you that airlines, as a rule, have never treated their paying passengers very well, at least not in the modern era. Airline employees typically view paying customers as nuisances to herded like cattle. It was bad enough in the 1990s. Since then, 9/11 and industry consolidation have only made things worse.
There is only one way to fly commercially: and that is to fly commercially as little as possible. Nevertheless, I extend my sympathies to those who chose to travel via Southwest this week, and found themselves camping out in airports instead.
What could be controversial about a playful song from a 1949 romantic comedy?
In the twenty-first century, everything, of course.
Below is a clip from Neptune’s Daughter, in which two playful, but persistent seduction attempts unfold.
Watch the entire clip. Two couples are involved. In the case of the first couple, the man is the amorous one. In the case of the second couple, it is the woman who is persistent.
Despite its age, the song used to get airplay during the Christmas season. But in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it was subjected to meticulous scrutiny, and many radio stations banned it in 2018.
Radio host Glenn Anderson of Cleveland’s WDOK wrote:
“I do realize that when the song was written in 1944, it was a different time, but now while reading it, it seems very manipulative and wrong…The world we live in is extra sensitive now, and people get easily offended, but in a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve, the song has no place.”
I do agree that the world we live in is “extra sensitive” now, to the point where everything needs a trigger warning, or multiple paragraphs of skull-crushing over-analysis. But that’s about where my agreement ends.
Anderson, and others who banned the song, apparently overlooked the fact that one of the romantic pursuers in Neptune’s Daughter is a woman.
When you watch the behavior that takes place in the above movie clip, can you find some questionable words and actions? Sure you can. But it’s a slapstick musical comedy, not an earnest attempt at relationship advice.
Now observe the slapstick violence in a typical episode of The Road Runner Show, and the lengths that Wile E. Coyote is willing to go to in order to trap his prey. Felonies are literally being committed in the cartoon sequence below:
Is The Road Runner Show an endorsement of violence? Road rage? Cannibalism? Perhaps this should be banned, too.
(Oh, no, I have given the perpetually offended culture nannies yet another idea. Sorry, folks.)
The larger point here is that moviegoing audiences in 1949—not to mention journalists and paid culture critics—were far more sophisticated than their counterparts of today. They were able to discern the make-believe and altered reality of a musical from real life. (How often do people sing conversations in real life, after all?)
Today, however, at least half of us are locked into a literal, hyper-politicized interpretation of every movie, television show, song lyric, and work of art. With that mindset, it is always possible to find subtler and subtler levels of offense.
And of course, the hysteria over a 70-year-old song led to a backlash. One radio station in Kentucky defied the 2018 outrage by playing “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in a continuous, two-hour loop.
“Baby It’s Cold Outside” wouldn’t fit the culture of 2020 as an original song. In 1949, when members of the World War II generation were still in their twenties, sex was generally reserved for marriage (in theory, at least). There was comparatively little shacking up and hooking up. Marriage, moreover, was forever. (No fault divorce wasn’t a thing in 1949, either.)
Women were seen as the guardians of traditional values and premarital chastity. And most young women (and men) did have marriage—not just hooking up—on their minds in 1949. By the middle of the 1950s, a record percentage of adults were married, and the average nuclear family was raising 3.8 kids. That’s how we got all those Baby Boomers.
Cultural context changes over the decades. Take this famous scene from The Breakfast Club, in which a group of suburban teenagers smoke weed and dance in their school library. It seems a little silly—mismatched—to the youth culture of 2022.
To begin with, no one under the age of 18 is left without adult supervision for any length of time in 2022. And five kids placed together in an enclosed space in 2022 would not be talking to each other…they would be thumbing away on their cell phones.
But that scene from The Breakfast Club was considered cutting-edge, and culturally relevant in 1985. Just because it is mismatched to the circumstances of 2022 is no reason to ban it.
Such is the error of presentism—the intellectual error of judging all aspects of the past through the exacting lens of the present—including works of art.
Will they be banning The Breakfast Club next (along with The Roadrunner Show)? Like I said, let’s not give the culture nannies any ideas.
I know: blasphemy to some of you. Nora Roberts is, after all, a bestselling author who has delighted millions of readers over the years. I don’t dispute that.
But she’s also a writer of various flavors of romance, and every book she writes tends to be at least one-half romance novel.
Holiday in Death is no exception. It’s ostensibly a police procedural set in the near future (2058). Like other Nora Roberts titles, the premise of this one intrigued me, but I was underwhelmed by the execution.
Why? Maybe it’s because I’m a heterosexual male. I can only read so many paragraphs about the “beauty” of a male character before I gag, or at least grow bored, and start wanting to skip ahead. But female romance readers eat those details up.
Holiday in Death, sure enough, has all the characteristics of a romance novel. There is more sex than shooting, and the female detectives in the book spend as much time checking out hot guys as they do investigating the serial murderer who is the villain of the story.
The novel’s protagonist is NYPD Lieutenant Eve Dallas. She’s tough and snarky, and I’m fine with that. But far too much space is devoted to her storybook relationship with her unlikely husband, the Irishman named Roarke.
And here we descend into full-blown romance novel territory. Like most romance novel male characters, Roarke is less a human male than a personification of female fantasy. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, and (of course) he’s a self-made business mogul.
Roarke is tanned and well-muscled. (Despite being married and running a business empire, he still finds time to spend hours each day in the gym, one supposes.) And—of course, once again—he has long, Fabio-like hair. (Male pattern baldness does not exist in the universe of women’s romance fiction.)
Holiday in Death presently has a 4.7-star average on Amazon, with 3,885 ratings. Most of Roberts’ books have high ratings. Nora Roberts is not only a bestseller, but a multi-decade bestseller. Her first novel, Irish Thoroughbred, was published in 1981, more than forty years ago. I was barely in junior high then.
My intention here is not to knock Nora Roberts (once again, Nora Roberts is doing just fine.) My objective, rather, is to illustrate a point that many reader-reviewers (and many review-hungry indie writers) often overlook: a reader can simply be a mismatch for a basically good book.
Holiday in Death is a good match for many readers (most of whom are devotees of romance fiction, one imagines). Otherwise, it would not have so many 5-star reviews.
But Holiday in Death is a bad match for a mystery/police procedural reader who is a fan of Michael Connelly, C.J. Box, and John Sandford.
The book is probably a bad match for any heterosexual male. I was definitely ready to quit when I heard the paragraph about how the gorgeous, long-haired Roarke “emptied himself” into Eve Dallas at the climax of some acrobatic lovemaking. Sorry, but I don’t need to read about other dudes ejaculating. And if I did want that much detail about the sex act, I’d go to Pornhub.
For reader-reviewers, the lesson here is: don’t pan a book simply because it doesn’t match your tastes. (I won’t be rating or reviewing Holiday in Death on Amazon or Goodreads, as this is such a clear case of book-reader mismatch.)
For authors, the lesson is: don’t market your book to everyone. Your book is almost certainly not for everyone. Few books, after all, are for everyone. Not even books written by the esteemed Nora Roberts.
I won’t lie: I barely know Tim McGraw from Buck Owens. Country music has never been my cup of tea.
But who can’t relate to the song, “Coal Miner’s Daughter”?
Whatever your musical tastes, it’s inspiring to think that a girl born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky at the height of the Great Depression could grow up to become instantly recognizable, even to those of us who don’t listen to much country music.
She also brought joy to millions of people with her music for more than six decades. You might not be a rabid Loretta Lynn fan, but you probably know someone who is. Here in southern Ohio, I know plenty of them.
A lone American, kidnapped and taken to North Korea. He has one objective: escape!
A story ripped from the headlines, and immersed in the deadly politics of North Korea.
A thriller for fans of Tom Clancy, James Clavell, and Dale Brown. A riveting story about an ordinary man who is forced to take on the most evil regime on earth!
