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My mother used to write some of those magazine articles — “I Lived in My Car,” “I Married to Get a Green Card,” that kind of thing, and she enjoyed doing it.
For the reader, this kind of thing can generate personal interest along the lines of the old Ann Landers or Dear Abby newspaper columns.
I feel exactly the same way. Long ago, Survivor got busy teaching young people that cheating, backstabbing and phony, devious "affection" was the way to get ahead.
So far, sounds just like Fox News.
In an era when journalists are being arrested by a totalitarian GOP government merely for reporting the facts, I don’t think the problem is that the reporters are insufficiently “folksy.”
“The customer is always right” is a rule of thumb that may work for grocers, but it decidedly does not work for professionals like physicians, lawyers and journalists. The journalist’s mission to provide accurate, important and relevant information to the public, particularly information that the public does not know it needs to know.
I am amused by people who think there is something called “the law” the Trump will obey. This dictator will obey nothing.
By granting Trump total immunity, the Supreme Cult has rendered itself irrelevant, and the law impotent. It has wrecked the country.
Those of us who have seen this disaster headed straight at us for many years have felt like the mythological Cassandra, able to predict the future but cursed so that no one would ever believe us.
As Austen Leigh said, the hardest part of descending into fascism is bearing the weight of those who don’t see it.
And empathy is, of course, the basis of morality.
Btw, it isn't “assassination culture” at work here, Washington Post headline writers.
It’s gun culture.
In other news, we've had 46 school shootings so far this year in the U.S.
Oh, wait, that's not news any more, is it? Too common.
As Jim McNutt observed, “I see a lot of outrage over a shooting today. Where are your posts asking for prayers for the kids murdered in school today? Oh yeah, I forgot, that's just ‘the cost of the 2nd amendment.’”
Access to guns everywhere at all times now gives Americans the freedom to murder each other over political crack-pottery, childhood curiosity, too many drinks at the bar, not getting laid enough and the last parking space. The color of freedom is innocent red, and you can see it swirling down the street gutters.
In 2013, Zack Snyder gave us a Pa Kent who seriously suggested that maybe Superman should just let children die.
But as repellent as that moral viewpoint was, it was in keeping with the amoral American zeitgeist that has come to a boil in the 21st century.
After all, we once regarded Lord of the Flies as a horror story. But by 2013 we were treating it as comedy on Survivor, a long-running hit “reality” show designed to teach the value of deception, con-artistry and personal betrayal. Children raised on nothing but Hollywood's product might well be forgiven if they thought the two most popular professions in America were “assassin” and “prostitute.”
And in 2013, Americans were only a couple of years away from installing Donald Trump — a man who epitomizes utter indifference to suffering — into the Oval Office.
Superhero comics were born with an inherent optimism, as colorfully costumed exuberant rescue fantasies. It’s no surprise that they would be “out of step” in an era where cynicism, greed and even torture can be celebrated.
Superheroes were essentially super powers plus moral exemplars. The current corrupt culture seems determined to lose the latter, leaving us with a bunch of super-powered biker gangs cutting each other to pieces for our “amusement.” No thanks.
And thankfully, director James Gunn has joined us in that “no thanks.” His Superman 2025 is a bright, shiny answer to nihilism.
I always had every confidence that Gunn could pull this off, because he had already taken an obscure Marvel property that no one cared about — the Guardians of the Galaxy — and infused it with fun, adventure and heart, making it a major financial juggernaut for Marvel.
Gunn is as truly as masterful a storyteller as Frank Capra, and that’s something Hollywood is woefully short of these days. He understands that Superman is really more about rescue than crimefighting, more about heart than anger.
Hoult’s frighteningly evil Luthor has understandable, if completely wrong, motives. And Krypto the lovable Superdog is not just cutesy-pie, but made integral to the story.
Over and over again, Superman is placed in extreme, chair-gripping peril, and that’s not something that’s easy for storytellers to do.
“Gunn describes his take as ‘a story about kindness,’ which sounds simple until you remember how little space our culture makes for that word without irony,” wrote Charlene Badasie. “Kindness is only cool in hashtag form, while those with pure intentions are accused of being naïve or performative. But Gunn seems willing to push back against that cynicism by building a story around a man (who just happens to be an alien immigrant) navigating the messy, uncertain work of caring.”
“If Gunn sticks the landing, this version of Superman could reflect who we are becoming – not just what we’ve survived. We’re weary, distrustful of dominance, and starving for connection. We don’t want gods. We want people who fail and keep going. So this Superman might just meet us where we are. Gunn calls him ‘a kind person in a world that thinks kindness is old-fashioned.’ And in a culture built on sarcasm and self-defense, a Superman who chooses kindness anyway might just be the most radical one we’ve seen.”
Gunn underlines the fact that Superman’s fundamental kindness is out of step with our world. But let’s face it, it has been for 87 years. And that’s why, in the hands of the right storyteller, Superman is always relevant.
I’ve long been aware what a dreadful attention sink we’re in now as a society.
It’s a topic that Laura Marsh talks about in the March 27, 2025, New York Review of Books.
“In The Attention Merchants, (Tim) Wu likened these developments to another kind of resource extraction. The smartphone ‘appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way that fracking would later recover vast reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible.’ Wu, a legal scholar who has written extensively on antitrust, tells this story through sketches of the corporations that unlocked new segments of our attention. (Chris) Hayes writes more often from the perspective of the user; the person whose mind is being fracked feels, he remarks, ‘that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.’ Distraction has always been big business, but the immersive quality of digital media, in his account, makes it much more powerful and toxic.”
“(T)he algorithms of social networks can show each user content tailored specifically to them, based on all the things they’ve clicked on before. (This is how Hayes loses an entire hour, one stoned evening, watching videos of people assembling sandwiches and slicing them in half.)
“Social media can also capitalize on direct appeals to the audience by name. One of the more intriguing facts that Hayes cites comes from a 1959 study of people’s ability to tune out background noise and conversation when they wanted to focus: ‘The only stimulus so far found that will break through,’ the researchers wrote, ‘is the subject’s own name.’ Platforms that notify users each time they are ‘mentioned’ work on this principle; the most reliable way to draw someone in, even if the content on offer doesn’t particularly appeal to them, is by creating the impression that other people are talking about them.”
In America, the word “freedom” rings out like gunfire.
“Today we hear it used to shout down and bully school boards during their public meetings,” noted Bob Minor. “Nurses, school teachers, flight attendants and people just walking down the street have heard it used by people while the shouter assaults them.
“Freedom” has become a meaningless moron word, having “…attained a status so undefined, so empty of a definition by those who constantly hide behind their invocation of the term, so lacking in thought about what it could mean, that it seems to be an excuse to do whatever one wants and to hell with those others affected by whatever it is someone wants to do."
As one wise wit once said, “The absolute funniest art of capitalist ideology is that they somehow managed to convince everyone that ‘freedom’ meant the freedom to choose between 63 kinds of shampoo, and not the freedom to quit a job you hate without losing your health insurance.”
The sad truth is beyond their rhetoric, a lot of Americans have never been comfortable with real constitutional liberty. They find the winds of freedom frightening, not bracing. They’d really prefer to smooch some strongman dictator’s bottom and just CALL that “freedom.”
“Freedom, among the base of Trump’s Republican Party, means license to do whatever you feel like on impulse — too bad about the cop you concussed on Jan. 6th, or the elderly woman deathly ill from COVID because you refused to wear a mask, or the election worker now in hiding because of your death threat,” Mike Lofgren wrote. “This kind of freedom is the freedom of the Freudian id, bursting out of its civilized constraints like the alien creature in John Carpenter's The Thing.”
What Republicans MEAN by “freedom” is they want perfect freedom for themselves (including the freedom to commit crimes) and they want you clubbed over the head by cops or the military the moment you say or do anything they don’t like.
Republicans love to shout “freedom!” while silencing everyone else in sight.
Theoretical philosopher Thomas Metzinger warns we are being overwhelmed as “…social media and tech firms aim to maximize user engagement by creating ever better attention sinks and developing pathological, addictive forms of media consumption.”
As New Scientist magazine reported, “Our attention, says Metzinger, is the resource they want, and that entails destroying our mental autonomy — our ability to control the focus of our minds — ceding it to who knows what algorithm.”
And what does Metzinger recommend? “Of course, meditation, which opens up news states of consciousness and provides mental control. He asks whether it should be a standard part of education, and argues strongly for robust intellectual honesty as well as old-fashioned values like integrity and sincerity. We need, he suggests, a fusion of critical rationality with mindful attention to help us grapple with rapid techno-cultural change.”
“The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg,” wrote Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.
“After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? ‘Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!’ they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear — where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down."
His hand-lettered sign said “homless.” I gave him 10 singles and he replied, “Thanks … oh, wow!”
I wished him luck, this tattered, youngish man who’d run out of it some time back.
At a local restaurant over breakfast this morning, an old cretin sitting behind me was telling a man at another table the details about several Iraqi cells that were planning or had been thwarted in bombing attacks in central Illinois.
This to be said of a country where we killed several hundred thousand innocent people in an invasion based entirely on Bush and Cheney’s lies.
Funny how profound American guilt so often expresses itself in viciousness.
Americans seem to assume that the alternative to materialism is poverty. Ironic, because it’s clear to me that the result of materialism is emotional and mental impoverishment.
The alternative to materialism is an indifference to wealth that provides a relative immunity to greed.
Doing Photoshop art upstairs, I had a sudden urge to watch Father Knows Best, and wondered why. Not really a great show, after all.
Then I realized it may have been because I was drinking a grape soda, something I’ve tasted very rarely since early childhood.
I think it took me back to living with my grandparents in those earliest years, with that warm-as-a-blanket sense of absolute security that never comes again.
I used to watch that TV show with them on CBS Monday nights, often drinking a bottle of grape soda from a six pack that my grandmother would buy at the neighborhood grocery store just down the block.
Our national symbol shouldn’t be an eagle. It should be a scorpion stinging itself to death.
The whole hackneyed concept of being “seen” now has narcissistic vibes.
What we actually need is to be moving toward a principled goal — whether we are “seen” to be doing so or not.
