Not the odds, but the stakes

My Sunday movie was the English film Tucked. Jackie, an aging and dying drag queen, befriends a much younger queen. Jackie reminds us that not all drag queens are gay men. Some straight men like to wear women’s clothing and he made a lounge act out of it. That young drag queen is Faith, who has a great deal of style and is somewhere between male and female. It is a touching story of Faith helping Jackie bring some resolution to his life. Both leading actors did a fine job in telling their story. I enjoyed this one. I did notice what I consider a mistake – at one point Jackie is injured but why put on her tall boots before going to the doctor? The title, not mentioned during the movie, likely refers to the things people with male parts do to hide the bulge in their shorts when they dress as women. I finished the book Here’s to Us by Albertalli & Silvera. It is the sequel of What If It’s Us and it looks like I didn’t write about that one – I didn’t find it when I scanned my posts. The first book begins with Ben seeing Arthur in a post office in New York City. Ben is sending a box of stuff to his ex-boyfriend. Ben is sixteen and Arthur is seventeen. They don’t exchange contact info then, so part of the book is about them trying to find each other. The rest of the book is them falling in love over the summer. Then they decide to break up because Arthur is going off to college and Ben doesn’t want a long-distance relationship. The second book is two years later. Arthur is back in the city for an internship with a gay theater director. He’s dating Mikey, who he met at college and is home in Boston. Ben is in his first year at a college in the city and is dating Mario, though hasn’t yet called him a boyfriend. Yeah, we know where this is going. The blurb on the back hints as much. So much of the story is them realizing who really loves who and how they overcome obstacles to get back together. It’s a pretty good story because it actually gets into the emotional consequences of their dilemma. I enjoyed both. I had written about the 100 year old woman who had testified against banning books in Martin County, Florida. She brought along a quilt she had made featuring titles of banned books. Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community has more about her testimony and included a pretty good photo of her quilt. When I last posted the nasty guy was about to hold a campaign rally in Waco, Texas. Joyce Alene tweeted an intro to an article on Substack (which I didn’t read) about the importance of the date and location of his first rally for the 2024 campaign. It was held on the anniversary of the date federal agents set fire to the Branch Davidian compound with a large loss of life. The day after the rally Jack Smith posted a picture of the crowd. He commented, “There were more people in line for bathrooms at the Taylor Swift concert.” Karl included Smith’s photo and tweeted:

The Republican fascist movement is depending on media to distort the size of those pushing everything from the end of roe to the end of LGBTQ rights and civil rights. The Republicans are outnumbered 20-1 nationally and the media is negligent in painting it in any other way.

The nasty guy still hasn’t been indicted, even though he said he would be soon and media crews have been camping outside the Manhattan courthouse. I heard today the soonest it might happen is the end of April. Michael de Adder tweeted a cartoon of a black man being handcuffed as a prison warden reads a paper with the headline “Trump tried to seize voting machines.” The black man asks, “How much more evidence do they need? I got nabbed for $10 worth of marijuana.” Marion tweeted a cartoon by Mackay showing the indictment as the cover article on Soap Opera Weekly. Hunter of Kos reported House Republicans have been trying to intimidate Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney likely to first indict the nasty guy. Bragg is holding firm. So Republicans are proposing a bill “banning former presidents from being indicted for anything, ever” – in Hunter’s description. Republican reasoning is something about state and local justice are inherently politically motivated. Stunts like that – and similar stunts over the last couple decades – do have an effect on the national mood. Kerry Eleveld of Kos started a post with:

The Wall Street Journal won't say it, but a new poll the outlet released Monday gives a pretty strong indication that Republicans have managed to sully values most Americans once held dear, such as patriotism and religiosity. The poll, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, found cliff-like declines over the past couple of decades in how many Americans describe patriotism and religion as "very important" to them. While 70% of adults viewed patriotism that way in 1998 and 62% said the same about religion, today, just 38% of respondents called patriotism very important, while 39% said the same about religion.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

I've been tracking the right for 15+ years, I know why the prospect of 4 indictments is only boosting Trump It's a movement that only cares about avenging the people they hate - the people who hate Trump America riding in the danger zone.

Dworkin also quoted an article from Politico that discussed a book by Reisman and Kruse that explains the battle between the nasty guy and DeathSantis in terms of the staged battles of Wrestling. Think in terms of heroes and villains, or in industry lingo, faces (the good guys) and heels (the bad guys). Being the face means half the crowd reflexively hates you. But the heel gets to profit from the hatred of the other side. Jay Rosen teaches journalism at NYU. He tweeted:

"Not the odds, but the stakes." That's my six-word manifesto for better election coverage. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy. Not the odds, but the stakes.

He includes an example of the stakes by linking to an article in Vanity Fair about DeathSantis being for COVID vaccines before he was against them and now plans to ride anti-vax sentiment to the White House. Rosen added that we shouldn’t cut horse-race coverage. It has a place in the larger story. But too many times that is the whole story. Brother was at an event which included hearing Andrea Chalupa speak. She is one of the hosts of the Gaslit Nation podcast I’ve frequently written about. Shortly after that Brother sent me an article by Steven Mackenzie in Big Issue about Chalupa. Her parents were born in refugee camps in 1945. Her grandfather survived the Holodomor, in which Stalin engineered a famine in Ukraine in 1933 that killed 3-5 million people. From there Mackenzie discussed Orwell’s Animal Farm. It was translated into Ukranian and 5,000 copies were distributed to refugee camps. Most copies were destroyed by Americans fearing Stalin’s criticism. Chalupa’s uncle still has one. Wanting to get to know her ancestors better she came across journalist Gareth Jones, who first reported on the famine. His accusations against Stalin were declared fake news. That history prompted Chalupa to write a movie titled Mr. Jones. Chalupa’s sister Alexandra was the one who understood what Paul Manafort being hired by the nasty guy campaign in 2016 meant and tried to warn Democrats. She endured Republican harassment. In all the article is a good story of the making of an activist working hard to expose Republican authoritarian tendencies.