Trump the Shark

Since Kamala Harris had her political career abruptly terminated last year, so many people I admired, from celebrities to strangers I thought were my friends (to cop a phrase from Bob Seger), have let me down by bending their knees to Donald Trump and MAGA.  Mika Brzezinski, Kristen Welker, Bill Maher, Kasie Hunt, Jake Tapper - the list is endless, made more infinite by people who embraced MAGA before Trump forced Harris into early retirement, such as James Howard Kunstler and Elon Musk.  So you can imagine how tested I was when I found a testimonial post for the late Charlie Kirk on the Instagram page of one of my favorite fashion models from the 1980s, Kim Alexis.

Kim (I call her by her first name because not only do I follow her on Facebook, I am one of her personal friends on Facebook, and remember, I have met her in person) expressed her sorrow over Kirk's death, and she also extended her condolences to Kirk's family.  The reason Kim voiced  sympathies for Kirk is because she had actually met him and found him to be a personable and likeable guy.  Black women - including Beverly Johnson, whom Kim has worked with (and the results of their work together are stunning, of course) - would likely beg to differ, given Kirk's questionable questioning of black women's brain power, and so would I, except for a few things.

Remember, just because Charlie Kirk was a rhymes-with-glass-pole doesn't mean he couldn't be charming and engaging in a one-on-one engagement.  After all, Harry Truman, upon meeting Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Potsdam conference, took a liking to him, and actor Jack Lemmon, upon meeting Fidel Castro at a film festival in Havana, said that the Cuban leader had charm "right down to his toenails."  I'm sure Kim was charmed greatly by Kirk when their respective paths crossed.   I'm sure Kirk - who was young enough to be my son - would have charmed me.  And Kirk, to be honest, could exude charm in a public setting.  One video of Kirk engaging with a transsexual person making a transition from male to female caught him saying that he personally hated the idea of injecting sex-altering drugs into anyone to change their sex and telling the individual that he/she should look inward and determine through introspection what sort of body he/she felt comfortable in.  He said he was confident that he/she would make the right decision for himself/herself.

Of course, Kirk probably hoped that he/she would stay a he, but he grasped that that was not a decision for anyone other than the individual to make.

None of this, of course, excuses Kirk for being a racist, homophobic, misogynistic Christian nationalist.  But none of his character deficiencies apply to Kim Alexis.  Kim is a Christian, but she is not a die-hard fundamentalist.  She's not a Christian nationalist.  Good grief, her husband is Jewish.  And I know she's not racist - not because she has black friends, but because she has white friends (some of whom I know, like her fellow models) who would not be friends with Kim if they had reason to believe she was a bigot.  In short, she is not MAGA.  As a Christian, she was showing charity on Instagram toward a fellow human being who was needlessly shot to death in a country with too many guns and too many people who have no qualms about using them.  

And that Instagram post?  Well, that's what I was slowly getting to.  It's not there anymore.  Kim took down the post?  She did more than that.  She took down her whole Instagram account.  When I first saw the Kirk post, I did not leave a comment because I, quite frankly, didn't know what to say.  I tried to go back to her post to see what other people were saying in response, and that's when I saw that her account was no longer available.  It may remain unavailable for along time.  (Her Facebook accounts, where she did not mention Kirk, are still up.)

Even though Kim did not provoke the same visceral reaction in me that made me stop watching "Morning Joe" (and the rest of MSNBC as well) when Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski confessed their pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago two weeks after the election - I didn't unfriend her on social media - she certainly hit many a raw nerve.  So did Lisa MacKenzie (née Moberg), a Swedish veteran model living in the U.S. who also expressed sorrow about Charlie Kirk's death.  I'm friends with her on Facebook as well, and a lot of her other Facebook friends excoriated her for her thoughts and prayers, and I had to explain to her that Americans aren't as nice to each other as Swedes are. 

Kim's and Lisa's sentiments were clearly meant to be above politics, but this is a time when nothing is above politics, so it helps to be able to tell when someone is genuinely trying to express sorrow for a fellow human being's death and and when an extremist is martyring a fellow extremist.  I did not find their comments worthy of me needing to cancel them.  But long before Kirk was killed, I had to cancel a lot of people who expressed strong support for MAGA or bent their knees to it, be they people I knew personally or famous people I admired.  And that brings my post full circle.  I'm sorry to say that Kim and Lisa - both of whom I featured on my beautiful-women picture blog - are exceptions to the rule that anyone who expresses conciliatory or complimentary comments about MAGA figures ought to be canceled.

Speaking of my beautiful-women picture blog . . . It's been three months and change since I terminated it, and given how many of the women I featured turned out to lack inner beauty - most of them corporate-media reporters who coddle Trump when they should know better - I don't regret my decision one iota.

Charlie Kirk Is Dead

There are many reasons not to sentimentally eulogize Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist I knew little about and cared about even less.  

There are, in fact too many of them to list here.  I'd probably need an entirely new blog to list them. 

But among them are his observation that black women lack the brain power for high-level jobs, that Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deserve to be honored and that the civil rights legislation was a mistake, and that Taylor Swift sucks.   But the biggest reason not to sentimentally eulogize him - and here's something to ponder when you hear an Aretha Franklin song on the radio if it follows a cut from the brain-power-derived Toto ("all chops and no brains" - Dave Marsh) - is that he said the Second Amendment was worth the price of a few school shootings every now and then.

Bear in mind that Charlie Kirk was not only shot to death in Utah, but it happened on a university campus.  A school. 

Having said all that, I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk for the same reason I don't want to see Tyler Robinson, the guy who shot him, get the death penalty for it - and also for the same reason I personally oppose abortion as a Catholic . . . because only God decides who lives and dies, and killing in all forms is wrong.  That includes war deaths, because even though killing outside the rules of military engagement is referred to as "war crimes," the truth is, as I've said here before, that war crimes are a redundancy.  All war is a crime. 

None of this is good enough for Donald Trump, who has sought to make Kirk's assassination a cause célèbre among the right-wingers who support him to portray Kirk's opponents - who are also MAGA's opponents - as the enemy, and as an enemy that must be obliterated.  Making Kirk a martyr is part of Trump's effort to squelch dissent against his dictatorship by any means available, at least until he can make dissent a capital offense.  And even though Trump and his Trumpettes tried to bang the drum of derision against liberals by suggesting that a person of color or a non-heterosexual pulled the trigger, it turned out that the assassin was a white male member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - the original iteration of Christian nationalism in America - who shot Kirk because Kirk wasn't far to the right enough.  

Once the news broke that the suspect was in custody, Trump basked in the the triumph of the moment, and Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel took a victory lap.  Except that family members turned in the assailant.  Patel couldn't recognize a gunman even if you spotted the g, the m, the a, and both n's and let him buy a vowel. 

And yet the demonization of Trump's opponents continues, if only because Trump is now blaming the atmosphere of disgust toward disgusting people who advocate for an exclusionary, reactionary society in America on his opposition.  He's blaming liberals, democratic socialists, congressional Democrats, all other Democrats and who knows whom for Kirk's death by promoting their "radical" and "un-American" ideas and ideals in the public square . . . not that much different than when the Reverend Jerry Falwell opined that feminism and homosexuality were to blame for God removing His blessings from the United States and allowing 9/11 to happen. 

This is a dangerous situation, where anyone who speaks up risks retribution and anyone who doesn't speak up risks being taken away when there's no one left to speak up for anyone else.  All I have to say after all that is, I'm doubling down.  I am for the secession of Democratic "blue" states.  I believe that to remain in the Union isn't worth the violence that's coming.  I believe that it's time for the blue states to get out.

Swiftly She Comes

I wasn't planning to post anything on this Boxing Day 2023, but a recent news item about one of Taylor Swift's detractors led me to post this evening.

I have pretty much become resigned to the rewritten history of post-war popular music in which the heroes of pop include not just Chuck Berry and Aretha Franklin but also the musically lightweight dance divas who make their records and write their songs on their own terms and stage their work in a grandiose celebration for themselves and their fans, and the rappers who turned the privilege of  making music into a right by opening it beyond those who actually play instruments.  The villains are the cultural appropriators, the British invaders, the prog rockers, the metal heads, the West Coast folk-pop balladeers, and Billy Joel.  In other words, the white men. 

Charlie Kirk, a right-wing talk radio and podcast host I have only recently heard of, reinforced that cancel-culture history with a vicious and misogynistic attack on Taylor Swift for dressing suggestively (funny, I always thought she was one of the more conservatively dressed pop stars around) while saying she is not very talented and is a narcissist (wait, are you sure you're not talking about someone else, Charlie, like this bleach-blonde exhibitionist from Michigan who goes by one name?), and he also said that she "is a major reason why so many women are angry in America,"  apparently for her songs about her ex-boyfriends, and he called her "a bad role model" with "no redemption."  Kirk also feels like Swift is being forced upon the culture, and he compared it to - get this - colonization.  

And a couple of his confederates were even more vile.  His buddy Tyler Bowyer said the Swift concert he went to was an awfully miserable experience, complaining it was "all women and gays," adding that men don't really enjoy their music and men who say that they like her music actually "fake enjoying Taylor Swift in order to impress women."  

No, Tyler, men fake an interest in the theater to pick up women, though I know from firsthand experience that that's not very effective.

The pièce de résistance was when Kirk and his henchmen said that Swift is losing her ability to reproduce and that she is a threat to the nation for supporting women's and non-heterosexual rights while urging her mostly female audience to register and vote - and vote Democratic.   

Look, I'm not a Swiftie.  However, I have no problem with Taylor Swift.  I've heard her music and while I find it to be bland, I don't find it to be unlistenable or offensive.  And unlike many of her contemporaries, she's genuinely physically attractive.  Heck, I put her on my beautiful-women picture blog once.  The only reason I don't go to a Taylor Swift concert to pick up women is because Taylor Swift fans, like the star herself, are young enough to be my daughters (though I'd certainly make a play for any of their Gen X moms, so long as they're not wearing wedding rings).  And so I can't understand, for the life of me, what makes rhymes-with-glass-poles like Charlie Kirk go after Taylor Swift so viciously when there are other performers far more deserving of their derision who are of similar political persuasions. It can't be the music.

Then again, maybe it is.  Taylor Swift's music is by no means horrendous enough to be lumped in with, say, Nicki Minaj's or Cardi B's, but it's not rock and roll.  It isn't even country rock, at least not any more.  Its pure pop.  Good-quality, confessional, transcendent pop suggesting a David Gates influence, but it's still pop.  And maybe that doesn't sit well with white men like Charlie Kirk because it isn't rock.  Billy Joel recently said that Swift is to her generation what the Beatles were in the sixties.  Fancy that!  That must have caused a lot of heads of classic-rock fans to explode!  

I don't know what sort of music Kirk prefers, but the fact that he clearly does not like Swift's brand of pop suggests that he's basically a rock fan or a country fan who, like this rock fan, is alarmed and appalled by the low quality of today's popular music, but he probably goes after Swift (I won't even get into how he and his buddies think she's a misandrist, when that doesn't make sense as she's obviously still dating) because he knows that going after a diva of color or any rapper you could name will get him in even hotter water than his attacks on Swift have.

I wish he'd stop attacking Swift.  Not just because it's unfair to her, but it's making those of us who hate most of today's popular music look like bigger pricks than we already must.  Like previous generations of pop-music fans who saw their favorite music pushed out of the way by newer pop forms embraced by the young, we rock fans - white and overwhelmingly male, just like most of our idols - grouse about a need to return to good music and how younger generations are ruining pop with their questionable tastes and cultural values.  In other words, we've begun to sound like parents.  But thanks to right-wing activists like Charlie Kirk, we sound like something even worse.

We sound like Republicans.