Way Too Late

This time of year, we Americans sit down together to debate the eternal question: Is it too early to start celebrating Christmas? Should Black Friday fall before Thanksgiving? When do you put up lights and a tree? Are we ready to hear Christmas songs yet? Most people say it can be too early to start. But in the spirit of contrarianism, I’m going to argue that it’s not too early. It’s too late—way too late to start Christmas.

I mean, seriously—there’s only a month until Christmas, and you haven’t been celebrating it outwardly for months? What’s your problem? You should have had your Christmas tree up by Halloween at the latest. At the latest. And yet your home is free of pine needles and stray tinsel? Come on. Your house must have looked ridiculous decked out in pumpkins and scarecrows in October, like someone wearing tight-rolled jeans in 2002.

The sounds of “Christmas Wrapping” and “Let It Snow” should have been playing in your car and home since at least the summer. There are thousands of Christmas songs so late November is simply fatally late to start playing all of them. You should have turned down the AC in your car last July to be able to hear the synthesized sleigh bells better while the sweat rolls down your face.

I know I spent the summer getting ready, shut away at home and racing to get yuletide preparations underway in time for a September reveal. What’s that? You wanted to spend Labor Day weekend enjoying the last rays of summer sunshine? Amateur. I was barricaded at home with the shades pulled down, wrapping presents over the sound of the pool filter.

Forget summer: Christmas needs to start even earlier than that. I have been done my shopping since May. If a new game comes out that my son wants, or there’s a new record that my husband might want, they’re just out of luck, because they missed the deadline. Maybe next year, since while I resume shopping again on Dec. 15, those gifts are for next Christmas.

We’ve already left out some cookies for Santa. We haven’t left out the milk yet, of course—that happens on Dec. 20.

Thursday is Thanksgiving and I’ve had several blissful months of staring at the colored lights outside our house and the meaningful family decorations inside. I feel bad for people who don’t have that. They’re going to spend next month gearing up for Christmas, and that’s very sad.

Pizzazz!

As you know, I have strong feelings about the Trump administration. I used to write about this a lot but I realized I was commenting on a lot of little scandals that turned out not to matter in the grand scheme of things. I figured I would hold my fire until something really big happened and then comment on that.

Impeachment hearings, only the fourth in 230 years of American history, seem like a big deal (and bursting with PIZZAZZ! like a Busby Berkeley production), so here’s what I think.

I’ve been listening to the hearings in the background at work and following all the news and analysis, and after two weeks of testimony, it is clear to me that the House must impeach President Trump and the Senate must remove him.

If you take the testimonies as a whole, they paint a damning picture of a president who subverted foreign policy to benefit his presidential campaign. He clearly conditioned $391 of foreign aid to Ukraine upon the president’s announcement of investigations into his political rival, Joe Biden. This is a blatant abuse of power that makes Watergate look like a tan suit. Those taxpayer dollars had been appropriated by Congress under Article I of the Constitution and it is not in the president’s power to withhold that. It is vital that Ukraine receive this money so Russia does not get a further foothold into its former republic, which would be very dangerous and cost a lot of lives. Withholding this aid, or threatening to do so, sends a message to other heads of state that they can manipulate us if they carry out the domestic political errands of the president.  

This incident is Trump acting in his own interests and not in the interests of the United States, and that cannot stand.

Call it a bribe or a quid pro quo or whatever synonym you want but it is clear that a bribe is what this was. Trump’s response has been to repeat “I want nothing” or “no quid pro quo.” (I guess this is like when Nixon said “I am not a crook,” after which everyone was convinced and let the matter drop.) The summary of the July 25 call to Zelensky, the testimony of multiple witnesses and common sense have borne this out. The president and his chief of staff have admitted that they were asking other countries to illegally intervene in our election. Most damning of all was Gordon Sondland’s testimony, which confirmed that multiple white house officials were involved, including the vice president, secretary of state, secretary of energy and president’s lawyer. Sondland said everybody was in on it, and I haven’t seen anything to dispute that.

From what I’ve seen, the Democrats have made their case very effectively. What do the Republicans have? Not much. Devin Nunes moos out some conspiracy theories about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, which Fiona Hill debunked yesterday, and also repeats “Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton” and all the other wingnut greatest hits. Jim Jordan yells and whines. The Trump administration and State Department obstruct justice by barring witnesses from testifying. They’re doing this because this is all they have—the Republicans can’t defend Trump’s behavior, so they don’t even try. Instead, Trump smears Marie Yovanovich during her testimony, which is witness intimidation. The Republicans insinuate that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a Purple Heart recipient, has (((dual loyalties))). This is disgraceful.

The president must be held accountable and impeachment and removal is the only way to do so, especially when he refuses to be held accountable and sees himself as above the law or other oversight. The alternative to impeachment is to sit there and take it, and that is unacceptable. Unfortunately, the Democrats are outraged by what the president did, while the Republicans are only outraged that he got caught.

I would hope that the Senate also votes to remove the president. I know: LOL. But I still hold out hope. Stranger things have happened in the last four years. Just because the Republicans are not going to fulfill their Article I responsibilities and act as a check on the executive branch, that does not absolve the Democrats of doing the right thing and impeaching.

Last-Name Basis

I had a number of professors in the English department in college for multiple classes and most of them allowed students to call them by their first names. But there was this one student who one of the teachers insisted not use her first name. I don’t remember the student’s name but I got the impression some of the teachers were annoyed by him. In a writing class once, he forgot to bring a pen (this was back when you wrote and took notes on paper pretty much all the time). The professor lent him her pen, sort of flicking it at him with an expression of disdain on her face. Another professor asked everyone how far they’d gotten in the assigned book. The student said, “Getting ready to begin.” The teacher said, “At this point you should be further than that,” with a tone of annoyance (this was in a class where we read a book per week). Anyway, this one professor let all the students call her by her first name. She was a great teacher and a really nice person. So this student answers a question using her first name one day: “So, Carol, the semiotic hallmarks of deconstructionism …” blah blah blah. The professor stops him and says, “Dr. Jones.” Later in the same class, he calls her Carol again. She again helpfully suggests, “Dr. Jones,” nodding her head firmly. She had a smile on her face as usual but it did not meet her eyes, and I could swear I felt a hint of icy air in the climate-controlled classroom. I guess even the nicest people have little tolerance for people who annoy them.

Baby, It's Stupid Outside

Christmas is fast approaching in a whirlwind of garland and consumer debt, which means it’s time once again to engage in America’s least vital debate: What We as a Society do with “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” I am Switzerland in this discussion—an annoyed Switzerland, since I don’t think many questions matter less than this one. I just think every position on this song is not worth taking.

The new thing is that John Legend and Kelly Clarkson have released a new version of this song with less roofie content. I haven’t heard the whole thing but boy are some people outraged about changing the song’s lyrics.

I’m sorry: Is this the “Star-Spangled Banner” that we’re rewriting? No, it’s just some dumb song from 73 years ago. We can delete it from our national playlist and nothing of value will be lost. Why are we dying on this hill?

If radio stations stop playing the original “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” or play the new version, we’ll all live. I guess this thing is a beloved Christmas classic for people but there are plenty of beloved Christmas songs out there so we can always listen to those. As I said, I haven’t heard the new version but I can’t imagine being passionate enough about it to engage in a debate. I don’t think I’d even heard the damn thing until a few years ago when people started bitching about whether or not we should listen to it, as if the song itself were some crucial moral signifier.

On the other side of it, I don’t think society will collapse if people listen to the original. We need to promote women’s autonomy but there are more important fronts on that battle than some Dean Martin song.

Also, it’s not “censorship” if radio stations don’t play the original. The First Amendment protects the people from the government, not from radio programmers. We’ve been over this.

In conclusion, can we not do this stupid Kabuki theater debate of What We As a Society Should Do about this dumb song? Play “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in its original form or its remade form. Or don’t play the old one. Or don’t play the new one. Or burn the song in effigy. But let’s not waste our time on this idiotic debate for another Christmas because nothing about this song matters. And I realize that by writing this, I’ve just wasted further time with a debate, but that’s kind of what I do here.

REBRAND

In the spirit of rebranding, I’ve decided to REBRAND. Much like Facebook has rebranded as FACEBOOK, this blog will now be known as RANTS AND RUMINATIONS.

Why am I YELLING? I’m NOT. It’s just that an ALL-CAPS logo is FRESH and EXCITING and will turn everything AROUND for me and gain me scores OF readers for both my RANTS and my RUMINATIONS. As FACEBOOK (formerly Facebook) has SHOWN us, why DO market research to find out WHAT your USERS want when you can HIGHLIGHT the name of your COMPANY and click on “UPPERCASE”?

Companies CAPITALIZE non-acronyms all the TIME and it’s successful AS hell. It’s like, sure, you’ll buy Oreos because they’re TASTY. But if the company insists in press releases that THE cookies be known as OREOS, you’ll rush out to BUY them FASTER.

This REBRAND will help me in other WAYS. Like FACEBOOK, I often lose all the DATA of my USERS (both of YOU). This ALL-caps approach will help me KEEP data SAFER and make for a BETTER user experience. I have also been ACCUSED, like FACEBOOK, of abetting a RUSSIAN disinformation program to INFLUENCE the result of a federal ELECTION. Holding down the SHIFT key will solve this problem PERMANENTLY, and I hope I never have to TESTIFY before Congress AGAIN.

IN CONCLUSION: UPPERCASE = INSTANT TURNAROUND.

Bleeding Beyond the Gutters

You call them graphic novels now. They were comic books when I knew them, stumbled across with planning or serendipity before being chased out of a 7-Eleven. I can still tell you what combination of Marvel or DC I could buy for $2. I still see every cover date pointing three months into the past.

These days, the books come from Amazon, their CMYK gradations smoothed and finessed, and yet bled out. I saw the Kirby Crackle rendered in the rough technology of Ben-Day Dots. I haunted spinner racks every month to get another chapter of a story without seeing its end in sight. You get the story all at once in a budgeted diet. Long ago, everybody weighed in on the quality, but now it comes in cover blurbs and not a letter column.

Now you call them graphic novels as if you need some elevated word to describe better what critics have decided all of a sudden approaches art. As if you are new money ashamed of the backwoods accent you started with.

But there are some like me who saw the art bleeding beyond the gutters of lowly comics on common spinner racks, even when few saw it yet.