CSotD: Juxtapalooza!
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By now you’ve heard that Time magazine has named Taylor Swift its Person of the Year, which I capitalize because they’ve managed to make it into a Big Freaking Deal despite a few damp squibs and obvious choices over the years.
You can tell that Matt Davies has daughters, because he doesn’t seem particularly shocked and acknowledges that she is a powerhouse. One of my young reporters went to a Taylor Swift concert about a decade ago and wrote a glowing report that didn’t make me wish I’d been there but made me smile because she had.
Taylor Swift comes across as a good person and an excellent role model, and, by the way, so does Travis Kelce, who has enough fame as an athlete to be able to adjust to having a famous GF, and whose community work made him the Chief’s nominee for Walter Payton Man of the Year.
She’s been around a good long time and the fact that the Old Farts are suddenly aware of her says a great deal about how little they know about kids, given that her original fan base is well out of college.
Clay Jones celebrates this bizarre lack of hipness by citing one of America’s premiere Old Farts. I haven’t heard that Tommy has said anything about Taylor Swift, but his recent attempt to dig in his heels and stop the world is certainly consistent with the response by other self-important gasbags who respond to her success with declarations of how little they care, as if anyone had asked them.
At least when funny funny funny comedians were making jokes about the Beatles and supermacho fathers were ordering their sons to keep their hair cropped short 60 years ago, the Beatles actually were new on the scene.
It’s kind of pathetic how popular she has been for so long without the parental units even noticing. All the brouhaha now is hardly, how you say, timely.
The Coach Turns Into a Pumpkin
Speaking of Tommy, you have to assume he picked up a lot of popularity among the Forced Birth crowd for his stance in hamstringing our military to make a cruel, illogical point.
As has been mentioned multiple times, the people whose lives he was overturning had nothing to do with the decision to allow military members to travel for medical procedures, and, meanwhile, his destruction of the chain of command benefited our adversaries.
Bagley highlights his disloyalty to the nation, while Crowe focuses on his absurd failure to accomplish anything.
The sad part being that there is a strong contingent of people out there who enjoy seeing someone poke the system in the eye, with no regard for how it harms others or degrades our nation.
For instance …
Scoundrel Time
It is utterly gobsmacking for the Speaker of the House to, first of all, blatantly lie about why the Jan 6 Committee did not have more Republican representation, though it’s consistent with the GOP’s ongoing process of pretending the attempted coup was just a tour of the Capitol combined with innocent assault, theft, destruction of property and public defecation.
However, Johnson’s elevated this spin into not just denial of plain evidence but an official, concrete attempt to shelter felons from justice and to undermine the government’s authority. And all in the name of our glorious country.
Boswell quoted another Johnson in a way that applies to this one:
The loyalist MAGAt chorus may be cheering over this, but cartoonists have reacted.
Anderson references the fact that Johnson has not only taken up the party line about the events of January 6 but was actively involved in attempting to challenge the vote in court. He wasn’t simply one of the many Republicans who decried the riot shortly before they embraced the rioters: He took a leadership role in filing an amicus brief to overturn the results of the election in four key states.
Luckovich, meanwhile, combines Johnson’s desire to protect traitors with the Freedom Caucus’s attempt to impeach the president despite having fallen flat on their faces in their attempts to discover any criminal acts with which to charge him.
It’s good that Mike Johnson wasn’t in power 78 years ago:
A Death in (All in) the Family
Norman Lear’s death is drawing sad postings from his many colleagues and collaborators, and, given the number of radio and TV shows for which he was responsible, it’s hardly surprising, though a less congenial person might instead have drawn silence upon checking out. I heard him speak at an educators’ convention back when he was a mere sprat of 70 and he was very pleasant and charming.
His genius lay in seizing upon the moment, which included importing and adapting the popular British comedies Til Death Do Us Part and Steptoe and Son, turning them into All in the Family and Sanford and Son, and then creating a number of successful spin-offs from those hits.
Constant Readers will know that I was not a fan of Archie Bunker, in part because I was 21 when it debuted and, even without streaming television, I was in the stage of life seen in Bramhall’s piece where that sort of thing was irrelevant.
So I didn’t watch much of his work until I had kids and the TV became more of a hearth in our family. Even then, the only Lear comedy to which I was really drawn was E/R, a brilliant but short-lived sitcom with Elliott Gould as a doctor in an emergency room.
I suppose the fact that it only lasted one season is a testament to the difference between my judgment and his.
But I strongly disagree with Davies’ take, because I remain convinced that a large portion of the audience for All in the Family felt about Archie then the way they do about Donald Trump today: They took him seriously but not literally, and enjoyed watching him mock the liberal establishment.
And Lear must not have minded, or he’d have sued the purveyors of “Archie Bunker For President” gear.
The question is, would that have stopped us from electing Archie’s doppelganger in 2016?
Tune in November 5 for our next exciting episode!
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