Ya see, women can wear whatever they want, anywhere they want, because women can do whatever they want, and men are all rapist bastards. Got it?

Like men aren’t allowed to wear this shirt.

They can’t wear it unless they get in line to buy it from a sold out queue offered by the woman who designed it.

Yes, there are lines. For example, I did not look at the nude photos hacked by whoever that featured Jennifer Lawrence and company. I agree with her that if these were private photos, looking is a kind of crime.

On the other hand, when women want to be looked at, I’m delighted to look. Kim Kardashian is only a celebrity because she wants to be looked at. So I’m happy to help her out.

Any guy out there who won’t look at this?

So are transparent blouses.

And — NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW! — I, like every other guy on the planet, am fearless about confessing my willingness to see women’s private parts if they want to show them.

Not really. Speaking as I am for most men, we always want to see those parts. Why men are men and why women have so much power. Get used to it.

P.S. Nobody look at these additional pictures of Kardashian. They’re not suitable for evil rapist bastards to look at.

Hardly. But it just sold for $44.4 million.

Georgia O’Keeffe was a mediocrity who painted female genitalia. A one-joke artist who swindled the 20th century. Maybe a symbol of what feminism has become. Pretention as a substitute for vision.

Men have demonstrated more imagination about this subject. With some exceptions. With men there are always exceptions. But female parts are not always a flower. Sometimes they’re something else. If you study the output, women are mostly the cruder ones, men the helplessly admiring ones. (Old anecdote: man sees vagina; woman says seen one seen them all; man says seen one, want to see them all.) Witness this. And, well, this, which I actually like. Because like all men, I’m a bum.

Maybe a good reason why women in particular should read this essay by Mollie Hemingway.

I’m thinking not. In that it’s not obscene, meaning something that excites prurient interest.

Are you feeling any prurient interest? I know I’m not. Feel free to comment. She’s gone out of her way to make this and many other photos of her naked body available to us. She’s daring us NOT to find her prurient. If your boss comes and peeks over your shoulder and accuses you of watching porn on the job, repel him. Tell him, “This is no sexually attractive woman. She has breasts like a shaved nursing chimpanzee, droopy and anti-erotic. She has a tummy that would look pregnant if it were only firm rather than flabby. She has thighs like the liquefying concrete columns of a Hyatt hotel. Sure there’s a vagina somewhere between them, but who wants to bring the jackhammer to open the way? She has a face that not only could but probably has stopped a clock or a gross of them. Worse, we can’t even call watching her voyeurism. Us seeing her naked is all she lives for. That’s how pitiful and repugnant she is.”

Even women are tired of defending her. Here’s the saddest commentary of all.

I won’t say enjoy. You won’t. And I won’t apologize for sounding mean. It won’t matter to her. This is attention. What she lives for and can’t live without.

I truly wish it were otherwise.

The inestimable Tim has done me the honor of replying in kind to my many many movie recommendations. I haven’t seen this yet, but I will. He understands the value of reciprocity, for which I am truly grateful.

A Teen Flick Worth Watching

You’ve doubtless heard of Twilight and the Hunger Games. You may have even heard of Divergent, which is not at all the Hunger Games. But even if you are already burnt out on the recent young adult movie craze, there’s one that you should sit down and watch with any young adults in your life.

It’s called The Giver. You may have missed it because it wasn’t in theaters very long. Like the other YA films I’ve mentioned in comments, this one is based on a book I haven’t read. The premise is that it takes place at some undetermined date in the future. All that’s left of society lives in one city, atop a gigantic plateau somewhere. Everyone dresses the same, lives in the same type of house and is even given the same type of bicycle when they turn nine. Mist swirls all around the plateau’s edge so nobody can see anything below. Not that anyone is too curious about what’s out there, because they all take daily “medication” which suppresses emotions. For their own good, of course. They also have five rules to follow, among which are do not lie and do not murder. Clearly an efficient culture since they only need five commandments.

The big event for this society is an annual ceremony when, among other things, 18 year-olds find out what profession they will be assigned. These range from working with babies to mechanical maintenance, and whatever job they get is performed for life. Also, the elderly members of the population no longer able to perform their duties are thanked for their service and enter retirement to “Elsewhere”. More on that in a bit.

The protagonist, Jonas, discovers he has been chosen to be the new receiver of memory. He will receive not just any one person’s memory but the collective memories of humanity from the past (don’t question how, just go with it). Because in this idyllic, peaceful society, only one person at a time is allowed to remember anything about life before the current regime, and then only in case the leadership (played by Meryl Streep) requires consultation. The rest of the time, the receiver lives in his own little house, away from everyone else on the very edge of the plateau. On the first day of training, Jonas learns one of his new job rules supersedes a larger community rule: the receiver is permitted to lie.

Jeff Bridges plays the titular Giver, who transmits the memories to Jonas. The first one he shares is of riding down a hill on a sled. Jonas is wildly exhilarated by it because he has never experienced even a thrill that simple in his life, nor has he ever seen snow because the weather is controlled…

The receiver encounters many memories, most of a way of life long gone. We are invited to experience what we know from the viewpoint of someone who does not know, and thus to see it all anew.

The point to make is that the film shows, even if unwittingly, the realization of the nanny state. The citizens in the Giver know a lot and nothing simultaneously. They can genetically engineer people, perform maintenance on complex machines, and are all fit as fiddles. Yet their lives are completely detached from any knowledge of history and the past. They are told things are better this way than they ever were before, so there’s no need to know about any of that stuff.

The ultimate nanny, played by Meryl Streep, is not trying to be death personified, not really. She’s a true believer, not hateful in the way that Agent Smith is. She just knows it’s better to give people no choice other than the rules. Don’t let them choose. Let the smart ones, chosen by the previous generation of smart ones, figure out what everybody else should be doing. And if anyone gets out of line, there are thug guards and drones waiting just around the corner, out of sight. Because every utopian civilization needs thug guards and drones.

I linked to RL’s Agent Smith post above because I thought of that very post while watching this film. The elephant in the room the Giver never quite addresses is that its society is atheist as well as totalitarian. Yes, they finally got rid of “Sky Cop”, which is great. God not only hands out all of these rules, but he allows suffering in the world, so he’s a jerk. Who needs him? The atheists knew better and created a society free from pain. So how did they create this perfect society? Electronic cameras & mics everywhere, all to monitor everyone and tell them what to do. Killing critical thought, curiosity and individuality, as well as inflicting suffering on those who don’t get with the program. And the drones, of course. Sky Cop, indeed.

The greatest poignancy in the film is the character of the Giver, which unfortunately is not explored as deeply as it should have been. He, rather than Jonas, begs for more narrative attention. The millennials who comprise the target audience probably couldn’t empathize with him, which is sadly similar to the fictional world being portrayed. Instead, we get a power bike chase. Cue AC/DC.

I think many readers here, though, can understand the Giver. He is one old man, full of memory and history, surrounded by people who don’t want to hear it. His purpose is to serve as a glorified Google search, should a select few need to reference something from the past. He lives the memories of those who came before him, but feels his own cannot measure up. He cannot share anything he knows, and the majority of the population would not understand if he tried. And every day, he is forced to view the tragedy of seeing the world as it has become against the memory of how it used to be. Some days, this fate doesn’t seem very farfetched to me at all.

Olympian Swimmahs!

No longer know what to say. I feel like I should curl into a ball. But the truth is that Mercersburg has become the premier prep school in the country, the richest per student, the most beautiful, the most beautiful, and again, the richest and most beautiful.

Eeew… now they’re playing the president’s daughters’ school in football, and dutifully taking a dive. Aren’t we soooo correct? Sidwell Friends. Don’t know about you, but I’m impressed. (Gotta scroll past all the Hun School highlights. Scroll, scroll. Great M’burg runback in there against SF somewhere.)

Yeah, they lost. Can’t tell you how puffed up I am that my old school is now doormatting for Sidwell Friends. An honor, right? Uh, no. Quakers aren’t they? Phooey. We used to be a feeder school for Cornell, land of Ed Marinaro. What’s become of us? The shame.

Place to the left. Swank Hall. Where I was a freshman. Small 12 year old. No bullying. Why I’m a skeptic. People have always taken care of me. They’ve always known they should.

Interesting bit of querulousness at The Corner today, courtesy of NR enfant terrible Tim Cavanaugh:

The astute media critic Jay Rosen — who as far as I know is neither a conservative nor a Republican — goes full J. Jonah Jameson on reporters’ lazy assertions that the GOP congressional majority needs to “show it can govern.” Rosen sets up several phrasings of this truism– from the U.K. Telegraph, The New York Times, and NPR Congressional reporter Ailsa Chang — before knocking them down:

These are false statements. I don’t know how they got past the editors. You can’t simply assert, like it’s some sort of natural fact, that Republicans “must show they can govern” when an alternative course is available. Not only is it not a secret — this other direction — but it’s being strongly urged upon the party by people who are a key part of its coalition.

Now keep in mind that for NPR correspondents like Chang, a ‘factual basis’ is everything,” Rosen writes. “They aren’t supposed to be sharing their views. They don’t do here’s-my-take analysis. NPR has ‘analysts’ for that. It has commentators who are free to say on air: ‘I think the Republicans have to show they can govern.’ Chang, a Congressional correspondent, was trying to put over as a natural fact an extremely debatable proposition that divides the Republican party. She spoke falsely, and no one at NPR (which reviews these scripts carefully) stopped her.”

Which got me to reminiscing. Almost immediately after I became editor of the Mercersburg News, I experienced an almost allegorical journalistic challenge. It was 1969, the year of all years in the iconic sixties. A school which had always been its own self-contained world was suddenly bursting with the desire to be relevant in the exotic new youth culture. In a mere two years, drugs — chiefly marijuana and LSD — had rolled into a campus where drinking a beer used to be an expulsion offense. Seniors contemplating next year’s radical campuses were looking for an opportunity to prove their Woodstock manhood.

Easy answer? Break an ancient ironclad rule in a dramatic way. Led by four year boys, the would be radicals staged a mass walkout protesting our required 8:45 am Saturday chapel service. Dramatic it was. Staged on a Thursday for maximum surprise, the service was up-ended at once. Half the school exited after the opening prayer. I stayed. My best friend left with the cool guys. Our aged headmaster, who used to reward his best students with musket balls he’d dug out of the turf of Gettysburg, was stunned. He took the pulpit to call for a school meeting in the auditorium RIGHT NOW.

Those of us still in chapel passed the word and the walkout kids were happy to obey this particular order, which promised an opportunity for “airing all views.”

I took my seat near the aisle in the auditorium, and then I saw I was being signaled by the faculty adviser of the News. He was a former John Lindsay speechwriter, one of the radicals of that day, a five pack a day smoker, and he bent toward me to ask, “Are you taking notes?” He was smiling a mile wide smile.

Hadn’t occurred to me. But boy did I take notes. The headmaster recognized every student with a hand up. Everything spilled out, every resentment, every chafe against rules, every ounce of rebellion against our disciplined life, and he stood there like the man he was and took it, clearly grieving that his school had been sucked into the cultural hurricane of the age.

When the meeting — or manifesto, or tantrum, or political protest, or whatever it was — ended, I hunted down my chain-smoking mentor and asked him a single question: “Can I put out an Extra of the Mercersburg News?”

Within an hour I had permission. Sixty-eight years of the Mercersburg News, most of the last 40 or so of which, the paper had been the best newspaper in the private school world, but never ever had there been an Extra, maybe not in the whole private school world. When is there ever actual news, actual trauma in a closed community?

Which is when the journalism questions began.

I personally opposed the walkout. With every fiber of my being. But I was the editor of the Mercersburg News. How did one get chosen for the position? Lecture articles. Every Monday, some outside professor, writer, or scientist came in to educate the whole school during the last afternoon class period in the auditorium. One poor slug like me was assigned to take notes and write up the whole lecture, 25 to 27 column inches, for delivery to the newsroom before class on Tuesday morning. The paper had to go to bed by late Tuesday, so it could be published by Saturday morning in student mailboxes.

The guy that did the most lecture articles became editor. Why? He had to learn that his job was to report, not characterize, not comment. The speaker said this. He said that. There was no hint of review permitted. It was a lesson in the ABCs of journalism. Why Mercersburg had won so many awards. Our ancient Aussie carillonneur adviser prior to my Lindsay activist had established the tradition and the discipline.

When you became editor, you could express opinions in editorials. No one else on staff could.

So I went to the smartest faculty members and students I knew on both sides of the walkout controversy and asked for equal column inches from both. They all agreed to participate because they believed I would be fair. I also wrote up — maybe 30-40 column inches — of reportage from my notes of the school meeting, without a single snide comment or intimated dismissal. Just what happened, what people said. What I had been taught.

Even my editorial was even-handed. I realized after reading the contributors who had volunteered that there really were two sides to the walkout. I still thought it was a bad idea, but it was also true that there was no longer a closed community. We were all being drafted into the culture war of the sixties. And much as I might defend the Vietnam War, I still loved my Stones. I was torn just as the school was torn.

The Extra was published on the Monday following, in less than half the usual production time. (On the News staff side, it had been a solo effort at that.) A milestone for the school and for me. I was more a journalist at fifteen than the NPR glunks Jay Rosen is talking about. Why?

Multiple reasons:

1. I was heir to a tradition of excellence perpetuated for many many years by an exquisitely literate and conscientious adviser named Bryan Barker.

2. His successor was a liberal in the old sense of the term. He kept talking about the New York Times. (In my subconscious, he looks like FDR, with a cigarette holder. Actually it was just a cigarette.) He personally approved the dead equal balance I sought between pro and con on the walkout event. He was delighted with the newspaper product, not seeking propaganda.

3. I had been taught how to write journalistic copy, omitting the emotional and prejudicial words even to a fault.

4. The physical process of producing a printed newspaper enforces a respect and discipline of its own that requires one to live up to it.

I imagine most can work their way through to understanding the first three reasons. Why I choose to dwell on the fourth.

The Mercersburg News was a very physical creation. It commanded respect on that account alone. The newsroom looked a lot like the photo up top, though the typewriters weren’t so spiffy. But they were manned by unpaid writers who produced eight pages a week, ranging from sports coverage by people who were trying to be Red Smith to columnists who were trying to be Woody Allen or James Thurber.

There was also a row of wooden drawers containing woodcuts, only partially represented by this image of press trays. Commonalities: wood, shallow slots, sense of age.

All right. Let me walk you through it. Images in those days were blocks of wood with something on top, a quasi-daguerreotype of a camera photo or a metal relief sculpture of some kind.

Either or both had to fit into a physical page created by a Linotype machine.

Here’s how it works, you see. The Extra was the first time I had to oversee it all. Get the copy, pick the woodcut of the Chapel (which would be our only graphic in four pages), and hustle everything to downtown Mercersburg.

Then comes the Linotype machine. You have no idea. You’re staring at the world’s biggest typewriter.

The columns of writing weigh many pounds.

Yeah. Wanna hear? Go for it. Humbling.

I stood over his shoulder to watch the Extra being born. I felt like I was being whipped. What it sounded and felt like.

Think I’m boasting, talking triumph? No. Five years after the walkout, ten of the kids I’d known were dead. Mostly NOT Vietnam. Drugs, suicide, and other misadventures. I knew I’d witnessed a sundering. One that continues today. My Extra was ineffective puffery. But I was trying. Which when I look at it from my age doesn’t count. Like so much of journalism. But at least it was that. An attempt to see all sides.

I’ve reached an age of self examination. Thinking most of today’s “journalists” will never get there. So be it.

Amidst all the other crimes of the administration, this one has to rank high. An ongoing conspiracy to set American cities aflame in the name of racial justice.

The evidence is a matter of open record, however spun by mainstream media.

The newest news, buried in an article in the New York Times, gives us this, as reported by Gateway Pundit.

President Obama met with Ferguson protest leaders on November 5th, the day after the midterm elections. The meeting was not on his daily schedule. He was concerned that the protesters “stay on course.”

Gateway’s source is a sentence or two buried in the Times article titled In Ferguson, Tactics Set for Grand Jury Decision in Michael Brown Case, 21 paragraphs in.

Some of the national leaders met with President Obama on Nov. 5 for a gathering that included a conversation about Ferguson.

According to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has appeared frequently in St. Louis with the Brown family and delivered a speech at Mr. Brown’s funeral, Mr. Obama “was concerned about Ferguson staying on course in terms of pursuing what it was that he knew we were advocating. He said he hopes that we’re doing all we can to keep peace.”

Peace? That’s been the objective? Really? Maybe if you add a Monty Python-style wink-wink. Consider the prelude. And remember, we are still awaiting a grand jury decision about the facts of the matter. But back in September, the president was already speaking prejudicially about Ferguson before international audiences:

President Obama, once tight-lipped about the volatile situation in Ferguson, Mo., has been speaking out a bit more in recent days, changing his approach to the conflict and unrest there nearly two months after the shooting of Michael Brown.

In a few different forums in recent days, Obama has mentioned the situation. He has done so even as there is clearly little political benefit to doing so — and more likely, a bigger downside.

First, he riled conservatives by citing Ferguson in his United Nations speech as an example of America’s imperfections. Then, this past weekend at the Congressional Black Caucus event, Obama sounded a somewhat different note from his earlier comments on Ferguson.

He said before that “sentencing may be different … how trials are conducted may be different,” when it comes to African Americans in the criminal justice system.

On Saturday, he was bolder and more unequivocal: “We know that, statistically, in everything from enforcing drug policy to applying the death penalty to pulling people over, there are significant racial disparities. That’s just the statistics.”

Meanwhile, he had already turned Eric Holder and the Department of Justice loose to conduct an investigation before there was any factual disposition in the case.

Attorney General Eric Holder travelled to Ferguson, Missouri, Wednesday to personally intervene in the investigation of the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unprecedented and highly questionable move…

The issue in Ferguson is possible police misconduct. Investigating such misconduct is the responsibility of the Criminal Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The primary mission of this Section is to prosecute individual police officers under 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242. These criminal statutes prohibit officials who are acting under color of law from willfully depriving individuals “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” In this case, the government must prove that Officer Darren Wilson used excessive force against Brown during the apparent confrontation that the two had. If Wilson is convicted, the punishment can be extremely severe, including life in prison or the death penalty.

The unrest in Ferguson has obviously been triggered by unproven – and increasingly unlikely, given the emerging evidence – allegations that Brown was targeted by Officer Darren Wilson because of his race. Brown is not only a suspect in the robbery of a convenience store, but Wilson was apparently severely injured in the struggle with Brown. The notion that Wilson deliberately targeted Brown, let alone used vastly excessive force in the interaction, seems a bit dubious at this point. Still, Holder has dispatched a team of lawyers from the Criminal Section to supervise over 40 FBI agents sent to Ferguson to investigate this tragic situation. The attorneys “deployed to lead this process,” says Holder, are the “Civil Rights Division’s most experienced prosecutors.”

What Holder did not say is that it is these “experienced prosecutors” in the Criminal Section who he is so “proud of,” along with lawyers in the U.S. Attorneys’ office in New Orleans, who were accused last year by a federal judge in Louisiana of “grotesque prosecutorial abuse.” In a shocking 129-page order in a civil rights prosecution of New Orleans police officers after Hurricane Katrina, the judge castigated the Justice Department, using terms like “skullduggery” and “perfidy” to describe the misbehavior of prosecutors. This included making anonymous postings on the website run by the New Orleans Times-Picayune that “mocked the defense, attacked the defendants, and their attorneys, were approbatory of the United States Department of Justice, declared the defendants obviously guilty, and discussed the jury’s deliberations.

Fair and objective? Two smoking guns on this question. First, Holder’s reaction to leaks from grand jury suggesting that Darren Wilson might have been acting in legitimate self defense.

Attorney General Eric Holder says that he is beyond exasperated — he is “mad,” in fact — at the leaks pouring out of the investigation into the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Holder even went so far as to advise those responsible for leaking the information to “shut up” in a public interview at the Washington Ideas Forum on Wednesday.

“I think that somebody, these leakers, have made the determination that they’re trying to somehow shape public opinion about this case,” Holder told The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart.

“And that’s inconsistent with the way in which we conduct investigations, and especially grand jury investigations which are supposed to be secret.”

The leaks include claims that the grand jury weighing whether to press charges against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson has been provided with evidence that the officer fired two shots inside of his car during a struggle with Brown and that blood was found on Wilson’s gun. That would seem to support Wilson’s claim that Brown attacked him.

Second, a letter from a responsible law enforcement official making a damning charge.

As the Senate prepares to hold confirmation hearings for new Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch and as outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder continues to allocate Department of Justice resources to the situation in Ferguson, former FBI Assistant Director and Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund President Ron Hosko has sent a scathing letter to President Obama detailing the damage done to the relationship between law enforcement and DOJ over the past six years.

“The hyper-politicization of justice issues has made it immeasurably more difficult for police officers to simply do their jobs. The growing divide between the police and the people – perhaps best characterized by protesters in Ferguson, Mo., who angrily chanted, “It’s not black or white. It’s blue!” – only benefits of members of a political class seeking to vilify law enforcement for other societal failures. This puts our communities at greater risk, especially the most vulnerable among us,” Hosko wrote in the letter exclusively obtained by Townhall. “Your attorney general, Eric Holder, is chief among the antagonists. During his tenure as the head of the Department of Justice, Mr. Holder claims to have investigated twice as many police and police departments as any of his predecessors. Of course, this includes his ill-timed decision to launch a full investigation into the Ferguson Police Department at the height of racial tensions in that community, throwing gasoline on a fire that was already burning. Many officers were disgusted by such a transparent political maneuver at a time when presidential and attorney general leadership could have calmed a truly chaotic situation.”

A bunch of political posturing? No. Real human lives and property are on the line, all over the country.

BOSTON — From Boston to Los Angeles, police departments are bracing for large demonstrations when a grand jury decides whether to indict a white police officer who killed an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri…

“It’s definitely on our radar,” said Lt. Michael McCarthy, police spokesman in Boston, where police leaders met privately Wednesday to discuss preparations. “Common sense tells you the timeline is getting close. We’re just trying to prepare in case something does step off, so we are ready to go with it.”

In Los Angeles, rocked by riots in 1992 after the acquittal of police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, police officials say they’ve been in touch with their counterparts in Missouri, where Gov. Jay Nixon and St. Louis-area law enforcement held a news conference this week on their own preparations. Brown’s family is urging people to stay calm.

“Naturally, we always pay attention,” said Cmdr. Andrew Smith, a police spokesman. “We saw what happened when there were protests over there and how oftentimes protests spill from one part of the country to another.”

Preventing violence in Ferguson while awaiting grand jury
In Las Vegas, police joined pastors and other community leaders this week to call for restraint at a rally tentatively planned northwest of the casino strip when a decision comes.

And in Berkeley, Missouri, a town neighboring Ferguson, officials this week passed out fliers urging residents to be prepared for unrest just as they would a major storm – with plenty of food, water and medicine in case they’re unable to leave home for several days…

Imagine this whole thing explodes, as it well might, into rioting, looting and arson in cities across the country. Where would we look for the source of a nationwide detonation device? You know where.

Has this president and his administration ever done anything that wasn’t ultimately destructive of American good will and brotherhood?

No. Never. If America riots after the grand jury verdict, Obama and his minions should be arrested for incitement to riot.

Forget impeachment. Handcuff him and lead him away. Charge him in every death with conspiracy to murder. Tired of this malevolent paranoia and thirst for revenge for evils he never experienced.

The best one. Even the music doesn’t sound like an Irwin Allen building falling down. It sounds as sweet as Claire Trevor and Laraine Day.

Not that one is needed, but there is a line of reasoning here. There was a good air disaster movie once, called The High and the Mighty. Then there was Fate Is the Hunter and subsequently many others, reaching an apogee with a series of blockbusters named Airport Something.

All but the last of these featured professional pilots landing airliners in extraordinary trouble. John Wayne, Glenn Ford, Dana Andrews, Charlton Heston. You know. Men. Then the bottom fell out. Suddenly, damaged and stricken airliners had to be landed by someone other than a commercial airline pilot. Some movies stand out. That’s our subject for today. Read and learn.

Terror in the Sky. This isn’t one of the five. It’s the line of demarcation between the excusable past and the inexcusable present. When I broached the title to my wife and asked for nominations, she said Airplane.

Wrong! Airplane was the movie that swept away all previous air disaster movies.

Completing the circle: Robert Stack was the pilot John Wayne slapped in The High and the Mighty.

Airplane cleared the field for a raft of new abominations. Why Terror in the Sky is not on our official list. Its claim to fame is that it was the movie Airplane was based on. An airliner is crippled by food poisoning, and a desperate stewardess discovers that a Vietnam helicopter pilot is the only flier on the passenger manifest. He’s a PTSD case (obviously) and has to overcome his personal demons to land a vehicle the like of which he has never flown. Hilarious. Starring Doug McClure. It was almost funny enough in its own right not to require the gigantic hit spoof. But not quite. Why, incidentally, Leslie Nielsen owes his late and unforeseen comedic career to the guy who played Trampas in The Virginian TV series.

Sorry. Getting into the weeds here. Bear with me. My writing bones are broken at the moment, or at least sprained. Forgive me. What I’m aiming to convey is that in air disaster movie terms, Airplane made the tabula suddenly rasa.

Anyway. The new narrative had been set. Thanks to Doug McClure and Robert Hays, we knew that absolutely anybody can land a heavily loaded 747. And then anybody and everybody did. Starting with the president of the United States.

Air Force One. Time for an important point of definition. A bad movie can still be fun to watch. As are all of the movies on this list. I’ve watched Air Force One a bunch of times. It’s abundantly enjoyable. It’s also a terrible movie. But you’d have to be dead or not American to experience no thrill when President Harrison Ford says, “Get off my plane!”

Executive Decision. A movie with something for everybody except people who insist on good movies. Steven Seagal haters get to see the worst CGI effects ever in his unexpectedly early death scene. Halle Berry fans get to see her do all the heavy lifting while Kurt Russell skulks from baggage compartment to cargo bay in his tuxedo. I forget who the terrorist is, but he can’t stop one of them from landing the plane.

Snakes on a Plane. Oops. Did I already use the phrase “worst CGI effects ever?” Apologies. As a guy with a lifelong fear of snakes, this soporific movie featured some of the most lifeless plastic serpents ever shown on screen. The Samuel Jackson part was also lost on me. A guy getting a paycheck for what amounted to an Internet hoax: Make this movie and we’ll come see it. Except we won’t and didn’t. Because it was a bad bad movie with only one redeeming moment. The plane landed by a video gamer who had flown airliners virtually on the Internet. Cool.

Airspeed. Now we’re getting somewhere. From ludicrous to, er, ludicrouser. Spoiled brat on a private jet pisses everybody off and then has to save everybody’s life in an impossible sequence of events that includes a failed attempt to inject Charlton Heston (or somebody) into the cockpit en route. Loved it, loved it, loved it.

Turbulence. Just saw this one. It’s so horrendously wonderfully awfully transcendently bad that it’s the reason for this whole post. A fine cast in an embarrassing disaster of a disaster movie. Ray Liotta is a serial killer who insists he’s innocent. He isn’t, of course. He’s Ray Liotta. Lauren Holly is still just young enough to be a stewardess. Ahem. So she lands the plane after hours and hours of running and falling and dropping convenient weapons until Ray finally almost begs her to shoot him in the head and get to the closing credits. The coolest ever. Then Lauren goes on a date with Ben Cross. What more could you want?

Honorable Mention: Passenger 57. My wife mentioned this one. I don’t remember it. I mean I’ve seen it and all, but I have no recollection of the event.

Hip conservatives talk about South Park Republicans. People who have a sense of humor and an enormous tolerance for the potty mouths of Kyle and Cartman. It’s supposed to say something meaningful about who we are. I’m not so sure about that. It’s actually pretty easy to like South Park. The satirical targets aren’t subtle at all. Most of the laughter has to do with the obviousness of those targets. Rob Reiner is a hypocritical asshole. Hillary Clinton has a nuclear vagina. Ha ha.

The demographic that interests me is the AbFab Republicans. Do you know the show? Absolutely Fabulous. Brit sitcom. Any attempt at description is doomed to failure. Everything about the show screams satire, but the target is elusive. We have two women, both pampered and utterly worthless, one an ex-hippie narcissist and one an ex-groupie narcissist, both of them drunken freeloaders in the London fashion scene. They get a load on and take the Concorde to Paris to look at a doorknob for the rehab of the kitchen one of them burned down in the previous night’s binge. The only sane one is the hippie’s daughter, who is a humorless drab actively hated by the ex-groupie. At one point the two actually sell the daughter to white slavers in Marrakesh. But nothing they do ever actually works, so the bad penny returns and everything keeps going and going and going.

As descriptions go, the one above is pretty good. What it doesn’t do is convey just how falling down laughing funny the show is. Jennifer Saunders, the hippie (and chief writer) is so far beyond Lucille Ball in terms of timing and physical comedy that I blush even to make the comparison. Her sidekick, played by former model and world class beauty Joanna Lumley, is equally brilliant, amazingly able to top everyone in any given scene. Both of them are astoundingly willing to look just godawful bad in exchange for a laugh. Lumley, for example, is still a beautiful woman, but she seems delighted to portray a whorish, haggard, selfish bitch clinging to the remnants of her sixties youth.

One can grope for labels. AbFab is a post-modern nihilist grotesquerie that mocks the whole genre of situation comedies. Or not. It could be something altogether else. But what it does for certain is defeat the notion that a series must have at least one character you can really like and identify with. It doesn’t have any of those. Its point seems to be that if you’re really and truly funny, you don’t need anything else.

And funny it is.

Right now, it’s running as a marathon on the Logo Channel. Right. You know what that means. Gay guys love AbFab. So Republicans need not apply. Right?

Wrong. The deep satirical target the show consistently hits with annihilating precision is the absurdity of life lived without real human values. Fads and pseudo-libertarian Nietschean hubris don’t do anything but make you ridiculous. Every possible fad in ideology and self actualization pop psychology makes an appearance in Absolutely Fabulous. And nobody ever wins.

You can watch it and roll on the floor laughing without being gay. Trust me. And all these years later, Lumley is still — underneath the clown makeup — as hot as she was in The New Avengers.

How you can be sure you’re still a Republican.

The survivors are all depressed. The Big Guy’s the worst of all of us.

When he’s not on Mommy’s lap, he’s demanding we all go to bed.

Good news? I’ve finally remembered Izzie’s theme song.

Why is it the right song? She just flung herself. At everything. A gifted athlete with no judgment whatsoever. She fell off counters, chair arms, and rafters. Got herself a black eye once visiting our feral Cassie in the garage. Fell from the roof beams. She started fights constantly with Mickey and Elliott, counting on her speed and agility — Sugar Ray Robinson-like — to see her through. But they doubled her weight and not once in any of these bouts did she ever win. Not. One. Single. Time.

She never cried in defeat. But she did yell her way through life. Loudest cat you can have that isn’t Siamese. When we carted her into the vet’s office in her carrier, they knew immediately she was a Bengal. Small consolation for us, who heard her yell continuously from home to vet and back home again. And when, in the mornings, the faucet wasn’t turned on for her to drink from.

We got her two Italian water fountains. What kind of seven pound person could make you do that? Izzie is short for Isis, the Egyptian goddess of life. She was that for us. From first to last she did it her way.

Numb indeed. But not comfortably. Though there is something to the idea of The Wall. At the moment anyway.

Izzie’s gone. Memories and lamentations later.

Molly, Mickey, and Izzie gone. Our household cut almost in half in less than a month. We’ll survive, but bear with us for a time.

She’s eating like a horse and she’s skin and bones. Been to the vet once, gave the meds, and she’s skinnier than ever.

We’re not up for another vigil. Raebert groans all day. We know other people have it worse, believe me. But it isn’t making us smarter or more amusing.

Typical, I suppose. ESPN had magnificent footage of the national anthem delivered by a vet who is now a reverend, as well as the the fly around of the eagle who constitutes the real mascot of the team with all the symbolism that entails.

But that footage is not available. Why? Because it would mitigate ESPN’s reflexive villainization of Philadelphia? Or because like all braindead lefties, ESPN sneers at simple patriotism and will never lift a finger to promote it?

Interestingly, the Philly fans were moved by this prelude to the game. Many posted their own videos, and one radio station (WIP) concluded their broadcast this morning with a complete replay of the national anthem from yesterday’s obliteration by the Eagles of the Carolina Panthers.

Veterans Day. Anybody remember or care what it’s about? Some in Philly do. Why we have jet flyovers even when it isn’t Veterans Day.

And why we still fly a real eagle in concert with the National Anthem.

Fly, Eagle, Fly.

P.S. Finally. A local affiliate has posted this.

And the story, which contains these moving words.

Retired Petty Officer First Class Generald Wilson delivered a rendition of the national anthem that sent the crowd roaring and set social media on fire on Veteran’s Day eve.

“With me being in uniform, being able to sing the national anthem, it’s a great honor,” Wilson told ABC News after the game.

“You get to hear a crowd singing with you and that feels good,” he said.

Wilson knows well the feeling of getting a crowd on its feet, considering he has sung at more than 80 professional sports games over the past 16 years, including a stirring Oct. 21 performance of “God Bless America” at Game 1 of the 2014 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals.

There was something about Monday night’s performance — one that was back-dropped by a flag-draped football field, red fireworks and a live eagle watching from a perch high above the field — that Wilson said was different.

“My battery on my phone ran down with all the congratulations,” Wilson said. “So it’s been a blessing to be able to be a blessing to other people.”

There’s still something good in us.

How silly. All women are supposed to be 5’10” and weigh 120 pounds. Ridiculous.

Amazingly, though, women are perfectly capable of fighting back, as all of us who know women knew they could. Here’s the perfect answer to the Perfect Body.

And, as a NSFW addendum, Keira Knightley is also fighting back against the Photoshoppers who keep ballooning her bust size on movie posters. She looks good.

As all women do when they’re just being themselves.

I’m sad. The missus is sad. Raebert is crushed. I think he really thought he could save Mickey. I had a talk with him about it. I told him we had to wait it out, that Mickey would cross over and we’d all meet up later. Then he tried to sneak in another secret licking session with Mickey.

Enough? Nothing is enough. One of my best friends is gone. I had to watch his decline. Why do we do this to ourselves? Because the pain of loss is outweighed by the joy of life. As long as life lasts.

We’re about to lose the second member of our pack in one week. He was always “my handsome boy.”

We’re going to have another death in the family. His name is Mickey. Thing is, you can’t control the aging thing. My wife got three feral cats all at once. They’re all 13 now, except for the beauty who died earlier. We got Molly, not expecting that she would outlive all our other greys. We plucked Eloise off the side of the road about eight years ago, when the vets told us she was three or four. Izzie the Bengal is at least nine. We’re looking at the end of our pet lives across the board.

I was always the Scottish pessimist, my wife the Irish optimist. Our last two young’uns are Elliott and Raebert. Both less than five years old. But Psmith was less than six and my wife and I are both tired of tears. She won’t look when I show her adoptable greyhounds after I visit the empty space where Molly used to live.

The one who isn’t giving up is Raebert. He refuses. Absolutely. He insists on ministering to Mickey. He licks and licks and licks and licks — and licks — until we banish him from the cat’s presence altogether.

I feel both ways about it. He fixed my glued together eye with a single tongue swipe and he’s convinced he can fix Mickey by laving the facial tumor with the magical Deerhound tongue, so obsessively that we’ve had to banish him to the bedroom. Do we sound crazy?

Let me stress this: Mickey is not dead. He is unquestionably the toughest cat who ever lived, nine lives mythology notwithstanding. He should have been dead a week ago. But he WILL NOT SURRENDER. I told my wife I need a jeweller’s loup to see him breathing. He has a tumor on his face. He cannot eat or drink. What does he do? He lives.

At this point I’m relying on old mythology. I wish it were more than mythology.

I’ve loved this cat as much as I love my heart dogs. He breaks my heart.

P.S. Mickey just died. Bravest single consciousness I ever knew. Love, love, love him.

So why was Raebert so obsessive? Here’s a pic you need to explain.

Nothing to do with the election. Believe me. A great friend of mine from New Jersey has a son who’s just matriculated at a university in Virginia. A wonderful kid, the answer to every parent’s prayers — smart, athletic, kind, determined. I was worried when he chose a university in Virginia. He’s running into what I call the Southern Wall. I sent this to dad in hopes of explaining how to bridge the gap.

At 6:22 in, he quotes Faulkner on the subject of the souls of southern boys. It’s not racist. It’s just southern.

By accident, though, I discovered in the course of my searching this possible solution to an apparently unsolvable American mystery mentioned by Shelby Foote and affirmed by him as something lost to history. Maybe not.

Shelby Foote described the Rebel yell as a corkscrew up the spine, a kind of infernal fear. I’m getting that. You? More of Shelby Foote…

Thought I should share it. I can only hope I don’t become a ritual sacrifice at Salon on account of it.

My favorite place on earth:

But for you unreconstructed Brit racists who don’t believe in heaven, I can also offer you this:

Enjoy.

Yeah. Republicans won this round. Don’t get too excited though. Victories like this are supposed to put losing politicians on the defensive. You know, the ones who play by the rules. Clinton, Bush, et al.

But what if you don’t play by the rules? Many years ago, I was moved to investigate how Napoleon played chess. Not because I’m a fan of chess, which always struck me as a pretentious show of would-be intellect. How did the greatest general of the early 19th century play chess?

He cheated. Took pieces off the board when his opponent wasn’t looking. And how do you accuse Napoleon Bonaparte of such a low act?

Where we are. Long days and nights and months ahead of us.