I want to share some recent impressions, per nebulous ideas, okay? It's a rant in four parts (kind of).

Recently, on the same day, I watched three actresses being interviewed on the telly: career stuff, acting, work/life balance, co-star perks, directors, character choices, pregnancy. Theses were fairly decent interviews, not puff pieces, and by the end of all the interviews these extraordinary Women were taken out by rather ordinary, petty over-ambitious interviewers at Cannes or Variety or SAG/AFTRA (I won't say) and the actresses knew it. And it felt like cheap party tricks or ambushes, vile.

This kind of disrespect is going on all the time and in politics too ... And I wonder how much of one has bled into the other? Are decent people expendable? We all seem to be offered up by the flunkies of big business and media interests, or Bitcoin oligarchs or assholes who fancy themselves kings and can't leave an actor alone in her trailer to nurse her newborn baby. Can you imagine being so louche?

Along this same neural pathway, days later, expecting an uneventful and perhaps pleasant funeral to match the most inoffensive POTUS ever (that WAS the problem bc now we know more about America's character than ever before through DjT) I felt scandalized by the jockeying jocularity, smirking, chatting, thumping oneupsmanship, and thought about all the funerals, state or otherwise I'd seen in my life, and tried to remember when so much arrogance had ever been on display. When two feigned political enemies kibbitz during a funeral for a President who was pushed out of office by his opponent manipulating the Election's outcome through an arms for hostages deal, (investigated by GW Bush and dismissed), you end up witnessing the result of five decades of dirty politics and the Presidential history of character in three rows, and you can despair. 

When manners fall to guile, when crooks lie and cheat their way into Leader of the Free World part 2, I Am The Storm, it bleeds down through all layers of society into a deterioration of the social order, manners, and personal character. 

Since when was it okay to treat people as if they are mere fodder to be broken in public for media machines or for outlets that have absolutely NOTHING to offer without the beauty, intelligence, and vision of artists, and decent leaders however they are packaged or mourned? 

Since when have any of those politicians ever given half the heart, mind or character to being a peacekeeper rather than covering up their latest indiscretions by calling their lawyers or media friends to kill stories that cast their entire existence into question?  

A Mafia boss will sit in the White House telling the world what He wants ... or what another guy who is even worse wants and many won't know the difference. 

Do you see the connections? I suppose you either approve this with a kind of postmodern Schadenfreude or you feel something is missing bc it's continually being stolen.

If you read this far, thank you. 🎬