Are the TV shows I watch influencing my view of the election?

I watch a lot of TV. I tell myself that it’s mostly high-quality TV, and it’s not like I’m watching reruns of Hee-Haw, but it’s a lot of couch potato action nonetheless. I am starting to wonder how much of my views of the world and politics are filtering through the shows I watch.

For example, I am a tireless evangelist for The Americans. It’s about Soviet spies posing as a normal family in the United States in the early ‘80s. They go on missions that can seem outlandish: Bugging the home of the secretary of defense and a CIA agent, infiltrating the FBI, smuggling bioweapons, and murder, murder, murder. I watch so much of this show that I think it’s completely plausible that the Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee emails to spur the election of Donald Trump, who would be more favorable to the Russian regime. I can almost picture senior citizens Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, working one last spying mission for Vladimir Putin. Maybe middle-aged Paige is helping. Henry is still playing video games.

We have been watching a lot of Veep lately, which focuses on the absurd games that go on behind the scenes in federal politics. That’s why the hacked emails don’t surprise me or bother me too much: I already know how the sausage is made. I’m sure staff at these political offices suggest a lot of distasteful tactics against rivals and they may act or not act on those suggestions. Some of the content is alarming, but heads have already rolled and I am far more alarmed by the idea that a foreign government may be attempting to influence our election.

I also watch Game of Thrones and House of Cards, both shows in which monarchs and politicians will stop at nothing to attain more power, supported by a network of conspiracies. Cersei recently blew up the equivalent of a church in a densely-populated city to take the crown and Frank Underwood’s first onscreen act was killing a dog that annoyed him. So these people have zero qualms about doing awful things to get ahead. That’s why I think it’s scarily plausible that there’s some kind of quid pro quo between Trump and Putin, either on a personal or governmental level. Maybe the two have business dealings together, which might explain why Trump refuses to release his tax return that might show his wealth has ties to Russia or why Trump suggested the spectacularly stupid idea of running NATO like a protection racket if countries aren’t paid up on their dues.

Yes, I am aware that I sound like I’m sitting at my computer wearing my tinfoil hat. Developments like these are usually due to human fallibility and chaos rather than some Manchurian Candidate conspiracy.

But I just need to take a minute here. I’ve been trying not to talk politics too much online but I can’t let it pass that a presidential nominee has actually suggested that a foreign power led by a brutally repressive leader should spy on the United States for that nominee’s political gain. Donald Trump has requested espionage into his own country. That is not a joke or a gaffe; that is legitimately jaw-dropping behavior from a possible president. The man is not well. Trump just got the nomination a week ago and he’s already flirting with treason. Sad.

I had the most Growing dream

I dreamed that I was in the new house that the cast of Growing Pains was moving into. I was one of the Seavers’ kids and I was in my 20s.

The house had weirdly-defined borders but I got the sense that it was a really wide rowhome. It was filled with plush furniture and its hallways were big enough to fit couches and all sorts of furniture in them. It didn’t have a ceiling so it was sort of like a television set without cameras.

The rest of the family and a bunch of people were bustling around and moving things in. I walked into one of the bedrooms, assuming it was mine, but the younger, non-Kirk Cameron son of Growing Pains pushed me out of the room, saying it was his.

I walked around the house looking for my bedroom but couldn’t find it. Finally I confronted my TV mother, Joanna Kearns. She was like 6-foot-4 and was towering over me. I told her I knew the house didn’t have a bedroom for me and she said something about making room somewhere for me. Her reaction told me the family didn’t have a bedroom for me at all because they just didn’t think of me.

It just made me feel like I wasn’t part of the family at all. I was furious and was going to get an apartment and never speak to any of them again.

To add insult to injury, I never got to meet Alan Thicke.

Hello, I'm Melania Trump

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliché that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody’s looking for something.

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around and desert you. Never gonna make you cry. Never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.

I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Call me Ishmael.

Crazy, Lazy and Cheap

Now it turns out that guy who killed those police officers in Baton Rouge is part of the sovereign citizen movement, a group the FBI lists as domestic terrorists. This means he was crazy as well as a terrible person.

Have you read about these people? They sound legitimately crazy, lazy and cheap. The list of their adherents reads like humanity’s greatest hits and includes one of the Oklahoma City bombers and those winners who fought with the Bureau of Land Management because they didn’t want to pay taxes.

Sovereign citizens try to argue that they are not bound by any federal laws because the government is illegitimate and they are only citizens of they state in which they reside. Basically, they try to get out of the laws that bind the hoi polloi by arguing that they just don’t have to follow laws. I imagine that’s what they teach on the first day of law school: That people don’t have to follow laws if they declare they don’t believe in them. And of course, they refuse to pay taxes, not out of cheapness, but out of some brave protest against paying for services that benefit them.

These people believe the county sheriff is the highest law enforcement officer in the country (I guess since there are 356,000 county sheriffs in America, they each rule their own little fiefdoms), just to give you an idea of the level of logic here.

I read something once where sovereign citizens believe that if they send a very specifically worded letter to a judge, that judge will have to unlock their secret account in the Department of the Treasury and give them a bunch of cash. They must write these letters in red pen because red blood flows through their human veins or some nonsense. In these letters, they also write their names with weird capitalization and punctuation to differentiate their real selves from the corporate identity that the United States assigned them at birth, to which their parents consented by signing their birth certificates. I assume the sovereign citizen gift shop is filled with tinfoil hats of all sizes.

I have no patience for whatever nonsense people like these spout out. If you don’t feel like paying taxes or submitting to laws, stop waving the Gadsden flag and admit that you’re a cheap person who is trying to evade responsibility. If you really insist on opting out of taxes and federal laws, you should at least be intellectually consistent and reject any common benefits we receive from paying taxes and also reject any protection from those federal laws that you believe are illegitimate.

As high-minded as sovereign citizens try to make their cause sound, they just seem like lazy people who resort to the tantrum all lazy people throw when someone asks them to follow a rule: to scream “I shouldn’t have to!” There are plenty of things we “shouldn’t have to” do but we do them anyway because we’re adults. Join us.

When Nostalgia Goes Over Your Head

I don’t have any interest in the Pokemon Go game. I’m not saying that to look down at my nose at anyone who does. I’m also not saying it to broadcast how little I care because that kind of thing gets dangerously close to bragging that “I don’t even own a television.” The main reasons I don’t care are that I never got into computer or video games and I often forget I have a smartphone.

The other reason for my apathy, something that started me thinking, is that phenomena like these are partially rooted in nostalgia and sometimes I just don’t have it. I remember Pokemon (I guess it was a cartoon?) but I’m not of the right age group for to have any warm feelings toward it. So combine a disinterest in computer games and that I only have a vague knowledge of Pokemon and that means I won’t be playing it.

I think a lot of pop culture depends on nostalgia and if you were the wrong age to experience it the first time around or don’t remember it, you won't care about it today. I have a notorious blind spot for the movies of the ‘80s. A lot of people watched those movies on a loop as kids but I never did. I saw them once decades ago and didn’t revisit them so I have no remembrance of what happened in Karate Kid 2 or Mannequin or Ghostbusters. If I saw them again, they would honestly all be new to me. They weren’t important enough for my mind to retain. 

(Now ‘80s music is another story and I remember every lyric. This is because it was so much easier to hear a three-minute song over and over again, particularly when the radio was one of the only options and repeated everything constantly. The radio was an easy thing to listen to passively in the background, so it ingrained pop into my head, whereas I had to make an effort to seek out movies and often never bothered.)

There were also a few ‘80s movies I didn’t see until I was an adult, like The Princess Bride or Labyrinth or Hocus Pocus, and thus I have zero emotional attachment to them. If you start quoting one of them, I won’t really have a reaction. The only reason I know about the quotes at all is through osmosis from people quoting the movies all the time.

I love The Goldbergs but the ‘80s movies are often my least favorite part, just because I’m so unfamiliar with some of them. When they do homages, it flies over my head. I watched a few episodes of Fresh Off the Boat and like the characters but the ‘90s nostalgia doesn’t always connect with me. (I guess I technically came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s because my high school years straddled both decades but I am defiantly not a “’90s kid.” It’s ‘80s all the way.) I can’t hear a Tupac song and provide some kind of reaction. I’m like a robot learning about emotion.

Anyway, here is a list of ‘80s movies I’ve never seen: Pretty in Pink, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future 2, Back to the Future 3, Coming to America, License to Drive, Risky Business, Predator, Road House, Stand by Me, Tron, Beetlejuice, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Some Kind of Wonderful, Caddyshack. I can hear you now, gasping “How can you have never seen (insert beloved classic here)?!”

Investigating the Investigators Who Investigated the Investigation

The scene is the Official Investigation Chamber in Congress. A group of highly placed officials is investigating the congressmen who investigated FBI Director James Comey, who investigated Hillary Clinton’s emails.

House Speaker Paul Ryan: Congressman Gowdy, thank you for obeying the subpoena to appear here today. We are trying to get to the bottom of some statements you made last week while interrogating Director Comey. Did you or did you not ask him if Secretary Clinton said, “I did not e-mail any classified information to anyone”?

Rep. Trey Gowdy: That is true, Mr. Speaker.

Ryan: And is it also true that Director Comey said, “That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work related emails in — on devices or in space. Whether they were deleted or when a server was changed out something happened to them, there's no doubt that the work related emails that were removed electronically from the email system.”

Gowdy: That is also true, insofar as that was the gist of his comments to me vis-a-vis the question I posed.

Vice President Joe Biden: In other words …

Gowdy: … Yes.

Sen. Mitch McConnell: I’d like to address a question to Congressman Chaffetz. Did you ask Director Comey, “Did you review the documents where Congressman Jim Jordan asked her specifically and she said, quote, there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received?”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz: I do not recall.

Ryan: You do not … what? What?

Chaffetz: I do not recall.

Biden: But you did tell Director Comey he would in the next few hours be getting a referral from Congress to investigate Secretary Clinton’s statements?

Chaffetz (confers with lawyer for 30 seconds with hands over microphone): I do not recall.

McConnell: Moving on. Congressman Cartwright, I do believe you asked Director Comey about the “c” designation on Secretary Clinton’s emails indicating the email was classified. I believe you asked “Was there a header on the three documents that we’ve discussed today that had the little ‘c’ in the text someplace?”

Rep. Matt Cartwright: That is correct.

McConnell: And what was Director Comey’s response?

Cartwright: Director Comey indicated to me that in three emails, the letter “c” was in the body of the text but there was no header in the email or the text.

Biden: Three emails?

Cartwright: Yes, three.

Ryan: I would like to discuss some of Congressman Gowdy’s snark and sarcasm during the investigation. Congressman, you made a statement to Director Comey that “In the interest of time and because I have a plane to catch tomorrow afternoon, I'm not going to go through any more of the false statements.” You also said “You and I both know intent is really difficult to prove. Very rarely do defendants announce 'On this date I intend to break this criminal code section. Just to put everyone on notice, I am going to break the law on this date.'” Do you think your tone was appropriate here?

Gowdy (sighing heavily and rolling his eyes): Yeah, I guess.

There are several long seconds of silence.

Biden: Well, I think we’ve learned everything we can learn today. Motion to adj—

Suddenly, the doors at the back of the chamber fly open and Pope Francis, United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon and Apple CEO Tim Cook walk in.

Pope Francis: Nobody move! We are investigating the investigation of the investigation of the investigation. Vice President Biden, Speaker Ryan and Sen. McConnell, take your seats and prepare yourselves. Your testimony begins in five minutes.

Repeat as necessary.

HGTV HVAC

Half the fun of watching HGTV is criticizing the homeowners.

This couple on Property Brothers struck a nerve last week. Their home cost $650,000 and they had a $150,000 budget. The home inspection revealed that their heat/central air system needed replacement along with the ducts, to the tune of $15,000. Nobody wants to hear this but what annoyed me was their reaction. The homeowners stood there stricken and asked, “How will we pay for this?” They really had no idea.

How will you pay for this? Finance it like everybody else in America! Oh, sorry, HGTV can’t just write you a check for that and the federal government is all out of grant money to pay for inevitable home repairs.

“How will we pay for this.” Are you kidding me? You have an $800,000 budget; if you can afford that, I’m pretty sure you can take on some additional debt or move some money around to accommodate this. Shit, we were broke years ago and paid for a new HVAC system on our $150,000 home. Two years later, we had to buy a new roof. It was annoying but we did it. We opened a credit card with a low interest rate and then paid it off. This is how people pay for major or unexpected home repairs. Yeah, I know credit cards are evil and you should shred them and put the shreds in the freezer and shatter the ice into pieces and have a priest exorcise the pieces but we didn’t have five figures lying around. What were we supposed to do, sit around shivering and getting rained on until we saved up the cash?

“How will we pay for this.” Come down to Earth.

Then during the big reveal they noted the fancy improvements to the house and what they cost: $3,000 for a fireplace, $1,500 for heated floors in the bathroom, $4,000 for fancy hardwood floors, and $6,000 — six thousand GD dollars — for granite countertops. That’s $14,500. Can any math geniuses out there figure out which of these basic necessities they could have done without if they were really hard up for cash for that HVAC system? (Hint: The answer is all of them.)

These people seemed like the type who believed money was no object for fun things like a sliding barn door but couldn’t bring themselves to spend for an actual utilitarian purchase like heating and central air. Adults do what they have to.

I don't always care for the Christmas Tree Shop

We have dubbed it the Shit Shack because half the stuff we’ve bought at the Christmas Tree Shop seems to break or fall apart. It’s a good store for things like Fourth of July plates or things that are just a solid piece of decoration but if it has to function or has a switch, I find it all just falls apart.

I bought these little solar lights to hang off the deck at the old house. They gave off no more illumination than a pen light and then broke anyway. I got this other solar candle in this wicker basket and the thing broke the first time a breeze blew it over.

The latest was this new umbrella I bought for the deck table after the old one blew over and broke. I like it better than I did when I got it home but it seems very high, so it isn’t as helpful casting a shadow. The junction where the two parts meet doesn’t have a lot of overlap so the top part is kind of teetering a little. I’ll live with it but I am a pessimist and expect the thing to break.

God, I love to complain.

I’m not sure why I went to the Christmas Tree Shop to buy the umbrella. I know those umbrellas can be expensive and it was an unplanned expense so I didn’t feel like spending a ton and since we’re 10 minutes from the store, I just ran there in the midst of other errands. I figured, “At least if it breaks, it won’t have cost a lot of money.” That’s the reasoning why you buy things at the dollar store on impulse: It cost $1 so you’re not out too much. The problem is that the Christmas Tree Shop is more like the Thirty-Five Dollar Store. Everything just seems a little off to me and it’s cheap but not quite cheap enough to risk spending the money. You can find fun stuff there but you have to separate it from the crap.

I don’t know. I just have this general intolerance for crappy merchandise. So many times I will buy things from various stores and they fall to pieces so easily and I resent it.

Plus, walking into the Christmas Tree Shop is like stepping into molasses. It’s always packed so there’s no such thing as in and out. The customers seem like they make it worse, like they’re just resigned to standing in line, as one resigns oneself to the eventual embrace of death, so they make no effort to hurry anything up. I can’t stand that. Look alive. I don’t like shopping so I try to get out ASAP. Even when I’m not in a hurry, I’m in a hurry.