Great Expectations

 Betty White was very close to one hundred years old when she died. Just another couple weeks longer, and she would have made it to a century. The comedy legend passed away on New Year's Eve 2021. Her birthday was January 17. There was quite a bit of hoopla leading up to what became essentially a non-event. Please understand that I mean this as no slight to Ms. White. I remember watching her on Password with her husband, host Allen Ludden. They were quite the pair. Allen went to that big TV studio in the sky in 1981, and in all those years after Betty never remarried. 

But she didn't last until one hundred. Bob Hope did. So did George Burns. And, as comedian Bobcat Goldthwait once observed, they kept getting funnier every minute. Mister Bobcat meant that sarcastically, but the argument might be made that Betty White experienced a renaissance in her career as she grew older, rather than simply riding on the wave that is, "Really? Almost one hundred?" Her last film role was the voice of the owner of the eponymous animated dog, Trouble, in 2019. 

I could go on and on here, but I am actually creeping toward a potentially larger point. There were those who believed that these United States might not last until its one hundredth birthday. Happily, the skeptics were wrong, admitting the great state of Colorado to that union in 1876, marking it as The Centennial State. A hundred years after that, even as the wounds of Watergate and the war in Vietnam were still healing, America celebrated its two hundredth anniversary with parades and celebrations and collectible quarters which are now worth (checks notes) twenty-five cents. 

And now we find ourselves on the brink of our semiquincentennial, a word that had to be cobbled together to pump up the importance of the pending event. Two hundred fifty years is quite a run: two and a half Betty Whites. Here's the thing: Wouldn't it be awful if we didn't manage to hang on that long? A catastrophic event of some stripe that brought about the end of our great republic? The loss in swag sales alone would be devastating, while the great nations of Europe might cough and say something along the lines of, "What a pity. And so young." 

World War. Economic Collapse. Civil War. These were the kind of scenarios that used to be the stuff of dystopian science fiction novels. Now they're all on the board as we teeter toward our two hundred fiftieth birthday. 

Or maybe we'll just die peacefully in our sleep after a prolonged Trump. 

Reckoning

 I want to reiterate my stance here and now before I begin my tirade: No one deserves to be shot. I am firm in this belief much in the same way that I am a supporter of this thing called Restorative Justice. All of the loopholes like the "Stand Your Ground" laws found in some states, including the one in which I live, No one should have to die. 

Now I hear a voice from my past, the one that shouted in my ear insisting that if someone raped and murdered my mother I would surely be locked and loaded for that individual. A pause, a deep breath, and then the question that I did not ask at that time in response, "Why would you even think of this as some kind of litmus?" Like the sickest possible version of "Never Have I Ever," a co-worker of mine whose politics skewed several degrees to the right of my own seemed to take a certain degree of pleasure mining my resolve. Eventually I replied that I would hope and expect that as difficult as that situation would be that I would rise above my simian urges for revenge and instead seek out a resolution that didn't involve taking one more life. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that my mother would back me up on that. 

So the stage is set. Now I will say that I can understand why the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has had as many attempts made on his life as he has. This past weekend a young man carrying a gas can and a shotgun attempted entry into the "Southern White House" and was shot and killed by Secret Service Agents. This brings the alleged attempts on the convicted felon's life to three in the course of less than two years. While my disapproval jives pretty consistently with the poll numbers found  in and around this great land of ours. I will say that the white guy with a gun model hasn't done much to conflate the images put out by the twice impeached "president's" handlers of Antifa assassins coming to assassinate the last best hope of making 'merica great again. 

As a a matter fact, the current occupant of the ruins of the White House has been the target of more assassination attempts than any other previous chief executive of the United States, especially when you include the envelopes of ricin sent along in that first term. It does seem as though there are quite a few people who would like the former game show host dead. 

Again, I cannot stress this enough, no one deserves to die. That is not up to us as mere mortals. The reckoning awaits, not from those with access to guns and ammo, but to a ballot. 

But more on that later...

In Charge

 I've been in charge a few times. 

I was pep band president when I was in high school. Much of my orchestrated tomfoolery became legend, at least for a compact group of individuals. Eventually all that anarchic energy proved to be my undoing. As it turns out, being the authority in an anti-authoritarian group is a pretty tight rope to walk. 

I climbed the ladder at Arby's all the way to closing manager. They gave me the keys to the register and a nice brown polyester vest. I enjoyed it as much as I suppose anyone could enjoy a job in fast food, and my managerial style was modeled on which I saw around me. Roast beef sandwiches with a side of silliness and never ask anyone to do a job, even cleaning the shake machine, if you haven't done it yourself. I came back from a week's vacation just as the old guard was being phased out, and a quick perusal of the back room showed me two things: I was not on the schedule for the next two weeks and all the amusing/gross cartoons I had drawn and tacked up around the bulletin boards had been removed. Aloha, Arby's. 

Eventually I found my way to a video store, a setting which suited my needs for a job during college: Flexible hours and plenty of time to watch movies. Friday and Saturday evening rushes were tolerable when balanced out with the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon. That was when I instituted "theme days," during which each employee was encouraged to pick a film from a particular category. Like "rubber suit monsters" or "sweatiest movie ever." We traded free movie rentals for pizza from the place up the sidewalk in the mall. A change in ownership made all that fun go away. 

I used all that experience to my advantage when a spot on the warehouse management team opened up. Turns out that I was the responsible one: newly sober and a newlywed, I was going to build a family out of the tiny margin that book wholesalers made. Until the employee-owned company expired under its own counterculture weight. 

Now, some thirty years into my teaching career, I still get asked, "Why didn't you ever become a principal?" Well, as you can see, I had my share of time wandering around with a clipboard, checking other people's work. Watching the intensity of the interactions between management and customers in this realm gave me pause. I don't shy away from student or parent connections, but I also know that somebody else has the office, and the metaphorical brown vest and keys to the register. I understand that offering someone a two-for-one coupon at an elementary school won't bring the same result that it used to get in fast food. I have carefully massaged my job description to be as helpful and supportive as I can possibly be just before taking on an actual title. 

And every so often, I get some leftover pizza. 

It's What's Inside

 They stopped selling Sugar Frosted Flakes. This doesn't mean you can't get flakes of corn covered in sugar for breakfast. You just have to buy them under the oh-so-clever name "Frosted Flakes." Now, it could be that these flakes are now coated with a mixture of kale and other superfoods, supplying your body with all the nutrients you might need for a day in the world. Or perhaps the folks at Kellogg's figured out that back in 1983 people didn't want to be reminded of all the sugar they were sitting down with Tony The Tiger to consume. 

Much in the same way Post's Super Sugar Crisp disappeared from shelves back in 1985. That cute bear in the turtleneck sweater who sounded a bit like Bing Crosby didn't go away, they just didn't call him Sugar Bear anymore. And the cereal shifted to being called Super Golden Crisp and then to just Golden Crisp in order to distance themselves from all of that added sugar. 

Which did not make the sugar go away. It was right there in the ingredients that were printed on the box. It should also be noted here that Crunchberries have seventeen grams of sugar in one cup serving, and a cup of real blueberries has fifteen, so we're keeping it real here. The cups of cinnamon Chex cereal that we feed the kids at my school for breakfast has eight grams of added sugar, and the cinnamon in the name comes along with an additional gram of fiber for our young charges. 

All of this is to make a point that this is essentially common knowledge, most of which can be discovered by simply turning the container away from the bright cartoons found on the front and back and perusing the jumble of percentages and measures on the side. 

What if the same could be said for public figures? If the label on the side of your standard politician listed the percent of racism, homophobia, pedophilia and felony convictions like we do with breakfast cereals, wouldn't that make it easier to make our choices come election time?  Let's not get distracted by the cartoons of casino owners and cosplaying former governors. Let's stick to the main ingredients. And I'm not talking about sugar here. 

A Prince Of A Guy

  “They [the police] have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation. Let me state clearly: the law must take its course."

These were the words that the King of England used to describe the situation with his brother Andrew Nottaprince. Mister Andrew, as he is currently known in Great Britain, was arrested this past Thursday on charges of "misconduct in office." It makes me wonder how many of our our own United States government officials might stand up under that kind of scrutiny. And as a certain amount of meringue on top, this all took place on Mister Andrew's sixty-sixth birthday. 

But back to this "misconduct in office" business. British law defines it as: Willfully neglecting to perform one's duty and/or willfully misconducts themselves to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public's trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification.

Again, this gives me pause. I believe this particular bit of jurisprudence could use a spin around Washington D.C. And Mar-A-Lago. And not just the whole Epstein thing, though that seems to be a great place to start. Public trust in the former game show host, who has already been convicted on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. The business records that were falsified in order to obscure the payments made to an adult film star, Ms. Stormy Daniels, with whom the adjudicated rapist had an affair just after his third wife had given birth to his son, Andrew. 

Excuse me: Barron. Not a real Baron, just a name that sounds like royalty. 

Which he isn't. 

And neither is the father.

But it would seem that even royalty can be brought low when they exhibit misconduct in office. Like for example if the "person" in question was impeached. Twice. And appeared more than a million times in the dossier I like to call "The Trumpstein Files."

This is how we, in America, like to do things apparently. There have been no arrests made in the murders of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, while citizens of all sizes, shapes and colors are being snatched up off the streets of our country without anything resembling probable cause. 

There was a time when the British tabloids used to cheekily refer to Andrew Nottaprince as "Randy Andy." Maybe it's time to remember how we were all introduced to the convicted felon currently tearing down the White House and our constitution. Misconduct? Where do we begin? 

A Crack In The Ice

 What is the surest sign that a thaw is coming? 

A break in the ice. 

Not ICE, necessarily, but that's just part of the tumbledown of the once all-powerful Orange Wurst. 

On Friday the Supreme Court struck down the convicted felon's oppressive and periodically whimsical tariffs that had served as the backbone of the concept of a plan he had apparently dreamed up while taking one of his office catnaps. The highly touted one hundred thirty-three billion dollars raised from this tax on imports has long been described as a tax on consumers and not on foreign countries, but that didn't keep the Magical Misery Tour from rolling across the country spouting how other countries would pay. 

In a word, "no."

The Supreme Court, most of which was bought and paid for by the former game show host, gave him the same answer. Which must come as something of a shock to an administration that has up until now been rubber-stamped by the highest court in the land to do pretty much whatever came into its tiny, nasty collective head. Want to lock up brown people for absolutely no reason? Go right ahead. Want a new plane from your friends in Qatar? Don't mind if you do. Want to tear down a third of the People's House to build Barbie's Dream Ballroom? Sure, why not? 

At the end of the day, this is all about survival. Please don't imagine that somehow those Supreme Court justices installed in a rush by the adjudicated rapist have your best interests in mind. They'll still be able to buy the name brand of peanut butter. But what happens when the Awfulness finally recedes, and they want to avoid being removed with the rest of the cabal? The spine they seem to be exhibiting is merely a flex in the direction of keeping the job they are supposed to have for life. 

As witnessed twice prior, presidents can be impeached. Especially this one. 

And so can Supreme Court justices. 

Bye Bye Bobbie

 Hard as it is to pin down a "favorite role" of an actor who spent most of his career in "character" parts, I would have to go with Bull Meechum. You might know him better by the sobriquet The Great Santini. It was from this film that I snagged the phrase, "Hey, sports fans," when referring to innocent bystanders. It was also a starring role for Robert Duvall, who had spent decades showing up as the name just below the title. Or maybe even a little further down than that. 

Lieutenant Colonel Meechum won't probably make the finals for Father of the Year, but that was not the story. It told the story of a dinosaur stomping his way into a world that had passed him by, and the family that loves him in spite of the nasty roars and pointy teeth. This role was obscured for many by the much showier version Duvall played in Apocalypse Now, Lieutenant Colonel "Bill" Kilgore. You might remember him from his "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," speech. Very memorable, but not much of an arc.

Not everyone remembers that Robert Duvall was the original Major Frank Burns in the movie version of M*A*S*H. It seems that he spent a good deal of his career in uniform. As a cop or a military man, Robert Duvall's presence brought instant cred to most any movie in which he appeared. This might be his association with The Godfather and its sequel, which created a pedigree of sorts to which American actors could aspire. Having Bob around your set just added a little class to the production.

All that energy made it possible for Robert Duvall to extend his reach into smaller films, allowing him to win his second acting Oscar for Tender Mercies, the tale of a country music star who has left the big time. That was kind of the godfather, if you'll pardon the pun, of Crazy Heart, the tale of a country music star who has left the big time.  That one ended up winning Jeff Bridges a best actor Oscar. 

Of course, not all the films of Robert Duvall were Oscar Bait. Some were just straight up popcorn buckets, like Days of Thunder and Deep Impact. This would be expected from a career that spanned some sixty years. Mister Duvall lived to be ninety-five years old and his last screen appearance came at the ripe old age of ninety-one. How about that, sports fans?

To say that he stomped on the cinema Terra would be an understatement. There will not soon be another like him. Aloha, Robert Duvall. You will be missed.