Trixie, We Hardly Knew Ye

Joyce Randolph, best known as Trixie Norton, the wife of Ralph Kramden’s best friend Ed Norton of the tv show “The Honeymooners” is dead at 99.

Trixie was typically straight man to either Alice Kramden or her husband Ed wasn’t a commanding acting presence on the show but she was a familiar part of many of the set-up husband/wife battle scenes.  Farewell oh, last link to the Honeymooners, a venerable part of  tv history.

Fabulous 2024

JB – Welcome back to the PBS News Hour.  I’m your host Jiff Benetton and I’m here with New York Times columnist David Brooks-Brothers and Washington Post editor Jonathan Capon and we’re here to talk about the Biden reelection campaign strategy.  Tell me David, what do you think should be the Biden campaign’s highest priority right now.

DBB – Well Jiff, If I’m being honest, I think they should try to limit the number of new shooting wars to one per week.  Not that shooting wars are wrong or anything but it’s kind of a tradition to try and explain why we’re blowing up foreigners in some sort of detail.  I mean, it’s hard enough to explain who the Houthis are and why they’re not called Yemenis and where Yemen is on the map.  A recent survey revealed that 73% of Americans polled, identified the Houthis as inhabitants of the ice planet Hoth in Star Wars Episode 5; whereas in reality the desert home of the Houthis is more akin to Tatooine the home of the Tusken Raiders in Episode 4, or as I like to call it “the real Star Wars.”.

But all of this is happening while we’re still trying to explain why the Ukraine wants the Israelis’ money and it’s leading to confusion.  People are starting to get frustrated with all the flag icons they have to list on their profile on X.  Someone attempted to post the Yemeni flag with a slash through it and accidentally identified himself with the Cricket Liberation Front and a tragedy ensued.  As a simplifying strategy, during the next White House press conference I’d have Haitian Bette Boop say that all of these places are just different parts of Ukraine.  That would be best.

JB – Jonathan, what’s your take on the reelection situation?

JC – Jiff, I have just one word for Joe; FABULOUS!!!!  What the Biden campaign needs is fierce queer energy.  Joe needs a makeover.  A beehive blue wig, three-inch scarlet fingernails, stiletto heels and a B&D leather two piece should be enough to get this campaign moving.  They should bring in RuPaul as an image consultant and maybe give the First Lady a year-long furlough to an old age home to give the president room to explore his wild side.  I feel confident with Jolene Biden on the prowl the 2024 election will be jumping.  The campaign will become one big dance party!

JB – Dave, care to comment?

DBB – Uhhhhh, yeah.  I’m a little uncertain about Joe Biden as a drag queen candidate.  I’m not a hundred percent sure that the American public is ready for that much excitement.  In fact I’m pretty sure they want less Biden on their news feed.

JB – What are you saying David?

DBB – A recent poll found that 78% of Democratic voters wanted President Biden to make up fewer lies when he spoke to the press.  52% of Democratic voters said they were more likely to vote for Biden if he just hid out and didn’t show his face to the public until after the election.  I think that Drag Queen Biden would be unlikely to enhance his poll numbers.

JC – You know David, I always thought you were an ally but you sound just like a minion of the patriarchy spewing hate and trying to harsh the buzz that we LGBTQ people feel.  You white, straight, cis-gender males are the enemy of all that is queer and beautiful.  You should be ashamed for disparaging fabulous Jolene Biden and the White House Drag Extravaganza.

DBB – Yes, Jonathan.  …  I’m very ashamed.  In fact, I’ve gotta get out of here right now. (walks off the set).

JB – Well folks, you’ve witnessed history right here.  The patriarchy is reeling out of control and crashing to the ground.  If only there were a disco ball in this studio, we could celebrate the way we should.

JC – You go girlfriend!

JB – Right back at ya.  And that’s all we have.  From everybody at PBS, well everybody except that homophobe David, have a great tomorrow and a better yesterday.

Can I Review a Movie Trailer?

It was bound to happen eventually.  Hollywood needs to give us cautionary tales.  I watched the trailer for an upcoming movie called “Civil War.”  The scenario is a “fascist” president in his third term (probably named Donald Tromp, Ronald Trump or something else equally subtle) is fighting a war to recapture nineteen states that have seceded including the Western Alliance (or something like that) consisting of California and Texas.  As an aside, the guy playing the president sounds exactly like Mike Pence.

The heroes of the movie are three intrepid “reporters” who travel across the country and witness the horror of Middle America in all its racist something or other.  In the trailer we see white men with guns interrogating some seemingly Hispanic people and when told that they are Americans the guys with guns say, “But what kind of Americans?”  And then it looks they’re going to shoot them.  And there is lots of footage of jets and tanks attacking New York City and monuments in DC blowing up and I think it looks like the invaders breach the White House.

The Democrats are attempting to take Trump off the ballot.  What a perfect time to have a movie showing what will happen if a fascist president is allowed to run for president.

My favorite part of the trailer is near the end where the intrepid female reporter says, “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a message home saying, “Don’t do this.”  And yet, here we are.”  So even during a movie where the country is engulfed in war and the outcome should be the story we have “Karen” lecturing us about how we didn’t listen to the girl boss who knew best.

So really my only question about all this is how the hell did California and Texas form an alliance.  Are they commies or good guys?  Is it run by Gavin Newsome or Ron Paul?

Honestly, I’ll bet this movie will be incredibly annoying.  All the people we are supposed to applaud will be urban dwelling, latte sipping progressives and all the people we’re meant to boo will be white red state Americans.  I assume, at the end, once Donald Trump is dragged from the White House and burned at the stake, all of the seceding states will come to their senses and unanimously re-elect Barack Obama or some other BIPoC woman as president and we’ll finally reach nirvana.

Wouldn’t it be something if we could have a civil war movie where the bad guys were the people who were trying to destroy America for real?  The Summer of George rioting wasn’t exactly a civil war but it came really close.  It was akin to the Visigoths burning and pillaging the Roman Empire.

I’d pay some money to see a civil war movie where Joe Biden declares war on Texas and then gets his head handed to him.  I mean that makes some kind of sense.  I could see Texas just plain getting fed up with an immigrant invasion and putting a stop to it even in the face of federal intervention.  I’d love to see a movie where Washington calls out troops to force Texans to allow illegal aliens in and the troops revolt and join the Texans.  Now that I’d pay to see.

I guess I should wait until April and see what the actual plot turns out to be but I’d bet small change that I’ve just more or less spelled it out.  It’s a warning against Trump as dictator for life.  Please spare me this drama.

The Scatter-Shot States of America

The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock four hundred and three years ago we are told.  And those Puritans risked all to escape from the England of religious persecution.  Now it may be that the persecution was based on the annoyingness of the Puritans.  We won’t debate that.  Suffice it to say they wanted a place of their own where they were free; free to persecute unto death, whomever they chose, in peace.

And they succeeded fabulously.  From humble beginnings they spread across the continent and now in every jurisdiction where they were overrepresented; New England, the Middle Atlantic States, the Great Lakes Region and the Pacific Coast they torture anyone who disagrees with their whims.  And they have even set up a coalition that allows them to torture the other areas of the United States by means of federal legislation and executive branch administrative rulings.  They are indeed very organized and very effective at making other people miserable.  It is their whole reason for existence.

And yet, even now as rioting and thuggery turn the streets of once great metropolises into anarchic hellscapes, the greater part of the geographic area of the United States is still a wonderland of modern life.  For the most part we have the advantages of the electric age where appliances and machines provide us with multiples of a horsepower at our fingertips to do everything from transport us to a job located a week’s walk from our home to cutting up a fallen tree in a tiny fraction of the time it would take us with a hand saw.  We heat our homes and cool them using chemical energy derived from carbon-based fuels and we eat food that is kept sanitary by refrigeration.

Now undoubtedly things have begun to degrade.  The electric grid crashes enormously more often than it did even twenty years ago.  The powers that be want a lot of this cheap and convenient power to go away.  But even now with infrastructure degrading around us, our lives are immeasurably easier than our ancestors living a hundred and fifty years ago.  As galling as are all of the lies we are told about why our standard of living has to be lowered, it’s probably true that even after they take away fossil fuels from most of us, the United States will still be more pleasant a home than the majority of the rest of the planet.

One can only imagine what it would be like, living in the Congo or Egypt or Pakistan.  Even Mexico or Brazil would be many times less safe or comfortable.  So maybe leaving here would not make sense.  Maybe we cannot be modern day pilgrims leaving the place of bondage for a land of opportunity.  Unless we can find that promised land right here in the United States.

As much as the busybody Puritans use every power at their disposal to rule over us, maybe we can undermine their control locally and even regionally.  And with the modern abilities to network and organize people across great distances maybe we can produce coalitions of our own and pool resource and regain a large part of the control over our lives that the Puritans have taken away.

For instance, Joe Biden attempted to instate regulations to force cleaning equipment (dishwashers and clothes washers) to work with extremely low amounts of water.  This is supposedly environmentally friendly but what it does is ensure that these devices will work poorly.  And I assume that companies that do not adhere to these standards will be fined or their leadership will be liable to arrest by the environmental police of one stripe or another.  The solution to this is to have the red states provide safe havens for manufacturers who produce non-conforming equipment.  And thus, this equipment could be manufactured and sold within these states.  And similarly for other companies and products that the federal government is attacking.  A major case will be gasoline powered cars.  California has legislated a ban on new gas-cars after 2030, I think.  If Joe Biden is re-elected something similar will be attempted nationally.  That would be a perfect time for a coalition of red states to champion fossil fuel devices of all kinds and draw a distinction between free states and slave states.  Le the free states enjoy all the benefits of cheap power while the slave states try to cut their lawns with battery powered mowers and travel around in their battery powered clown cars.  That is until they stall out.

So maybe we can all become pilgrims within our Scatter-Shot States of America and attempt to wring a free and prosperous life despite the worst efforts of the Puritans to make us as miserable as themselves.  It may be our last best hope at happiness.