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tabloidtoc · 5 years

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People, March 23

Cover: The End of an Era -- in a tense public outing with Prince William and Princess Kate, Harry and Meghan Markle make their emotional last outing as senior royals

Page 3: Chatter -- Taraji P. Henson on wedding planning, Keira Knightley, Billy Porter, Dolly Parton, Enrique Iglesias, Keith Urban

Page 4: 5 Things We’re Talking About This Week -- Sandra Lee saves Justin Bieber’s cat, Chrissy Teigen comes for Girl Scout cookies, New Yorkers live on the edge, Beauty and the Beast gets a prequel, Justin Guarini joins the Britney Spears musical

Page 6: Contents

Page 8: StarTracks -- Jay-Z and daughter Blue Ivy chat with LeBron James

Page 9: Liam Hemsworth shows off his treasure trail in Byron Bay, Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union and his transgender daughter Zaya, Emily Blunt and John Krasinski at the NY premiere of A Quiet Place Part II

Page 10: Andy Cohen and his dog Wacha, Elizabeth Warren made a cameo on Saturday Night Live with look-alike Kate McKinnon, Paris Hilton and Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Courteney Cox

Page 11: James Middleton, Amazing Reunions -- Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox of Back to the Future, Ellen Pompeo and T.R. Knight of Grey’s Anatomy, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks and Phil Collins of Genesis

Page 12: Stars on Set -- Andrew Garfield and Lin-Manuel Miranda on Tick, Tick...Boom, Nicole Kidman on The Prom, Will Smith on King Richard, Kaley Cuoco and Zosia Mamet on The Flight Attendant

Page 13: Sabrina Bryan and husband Jordan Lundberg threw a gender-reveal party for their first baby, Style Tracks -- Celine Dion turned the streets of New York City into her personal catwalk

Page 15: Ben Affleck’s hot new romance with Ana de Armas

Page 16: Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel move on after scandal

Page 18: Heart Monitor -- Sean Penn and Leila George date night, Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton adorable duet, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas happy homecoming, Lady Gaga and Michael Polansky going strong

Page 20: Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom’s baby joy

Page 21: Alex Trebek beating the odds one day at a time, Angelina Jolie reveals her girls Zahara and Shiloh’s health challenges

Page 22: The Bachelor’s Peter Weber -- I had to follow my heart

Page 27: Passages, Why I Care -- Tony Hawk helps create skate parks in low-income communities

Page 29: Stories to make you smile

Page 31: People Picks -- Little Fires Everywhere

Page 32: Westworld, new on streaming and DVD -- Knives Out, Bombshell, Uncut Gems

Page 33: The Plot Against America, Stargirl

Page 34: Amazing Stories, Motherland: Fort Salem, Lauv -- How I’m Feeling, Q&A -- A Quiet Place Part II’s Millicent Simmonds

Page 35: Books, Q&A -- Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece

Page 36: Cover Story -- A family divided, their difficult farewell -- after a chilly final appearance alongside Prince William and Princess Kate, Harry and Meghan Markle leave their life as senior royals

Page 42: The tornadoes in Tennessee -- neighbors helping neighbors

Page 46: Matthew McConaughey turned 50, moved to Texas and became a professor, all in the past year -- why he’s excited for this new chapter and what’s next

Page 50: A young boy’s tragic death -- justice for Thomas Valva

Page 55: 25 years after losing Selena Quintanilla

Page 59: HGTV’s Mina Starsiak’s miracle pregnancy

Page 62: Rory Feek on life after loss

Page 67: Joan Lunden’s turning 70 and gets candid about the ups and downs of growing older and what she’s learned over the years

Page 71: High school sweethearts reunite and wed after 63 years

Page 73: Style -- what’s in for Spring -- Cynthia Erivo

Page 74: Shailene Woodley

Page 76: Awkwafina

Page 79: Diane Kruger

Page 80: Sienna Miller

Page 87: Second Look -- Simone Biles in Times Square

Page 88: One Last Thing -- Guy Fieri

#tabloid #tabloid toc #prince william #princess kate #duchess kate #kate middleton #duchess of cambridge #prince harry #harry #meghan markle #ben affleck #ana de armas #katy perry #orlando bloom #katyandorlando #matthew mcconaughey #nashville strong

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sciencespies · 4 years

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The Outsized Role of the President in Race Relations

https://sciencespies.com/history/the-outsized-role-of-the-president-in-race-relations/

The Outsized Role of the President in Race Relations

President Barack Obama’s love of the Martin Luther King quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” went so deep that he had it woven into a rug in the Oval Office. For Obama, writes author Mychal Denzsel Smith, the quote was used “to temper the hope his presidency inspired, to remind those who had placed their faith in his message of change that it would not be one singular moment… that would usher in a new and just society.”

Since the founding of the nation, the United States has had its share of moments that bent the arc in a more just direction, particularly on matters of race, such as the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation or the passage of the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s. Those actions came about after decades of work by activists and legislators, the people who inhabit King’s moral universe. The inverse has been true as well, as white supremacists and those too comfortable with the status quo have bent that arc of progress in a direction away from racial justice.

For better and for worse, the presidency, and its stewards over more than 200 years of history, plays a unique role in the racial relations of the country. The president has a tremendous ability to defend the civil liberties of the most vulnerable citizens and help heal racial divisions. Most people probably think of the aforementioned examples of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, or Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for civil rights legislation. Alternatively, the president can exacerbate racial tensions and enflame violence. In those instances, they might think of the times the president has targeted minority communities, such as President Andrew Johnson’s attempts to undermine black citizenship after the Civil War or Japanese internment under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Countless other examples, however should play a more prominent role in our national story. In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant harnessed the power of the newly created Department of Justice to prosecute crimes committed against recently emancipated African Americans in the South. He also sent federal troops to South Carolina to suppress Ku Klux Klan activity. Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal with southern Democrats in return for an electoral victory. Once in office, Hayes pulled federal troops out of South Carolina and Louisiana, effectively permitting the return of the Ku Klux Klan and the rise of the Jim Crow era.

While I had read about this history while studying for my graduate exams, I never expected Grant’s administration to feel so relevant to our contemporary moment. After conversations with Hilary Green, a professor at the University of Alabama, and Nick Sacco, a park ranger at the Ulysses S. Grant National Park Service site in St. Louis, I became even more convinced that Grant’s legacy should be a central part of the national conversation about how the government can combat racism. Grant’s use of federal force to support black citizenship takes on extra meaning when we consider that Congress had abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872, which had provided essential housing, education, and training for recently emancipated African Americans. This discussion about the Reconstruction Era came about for a new podcast I’m co-hosting produced by the Center for Presidential History called The Past, The Promise, The Presidency.

The first season explores the complicated relationship between the president and race, from Lincoln to Donald Trump. Each week, a new episode will drop with expert interviews offering insights on the complex racial story of this nation, what events should be better known, the moments of missed potential, and more.

Sometimes the episodes will push back on well-trod narratives. Historians Edna Medford and Eric Foner ruminated on the many Lincolns in American memory. Lincoln’s contested legacy, his evolution on slavery and abolition, and his imperfections are an essential part of understanding the Civil War. “Lincoln hated slavery. Why?” says Foner. “Because it was a violation of democratic principles, because it violated the Declaration of Independence, because it was injurious to white labor. Notice, I haven’t mentioned race yet. When people ask me, ‘What did Lincoln think about race?’ My first answer is that he didn’t think about race much.”

An American history that remembers Lincoln as someone who didn’t believe in racial equality, initially opposed emancipation, but then changed his mind when confronted with additional information is a richer and more honest version. “Lincoln was not a saint, he was a human being with all of the same foibles as the rest of us,” adds Medford. “Despite that, he did great things, and that’s what we need to remember about him. He really did want a society where people could rise.”

The presidency and race is not just a black-white binary. For instance, Grant’s legacy as the vanquisher of the Confederacy and protector of black rights is marred when evaluating his role in displacing Native American nations from their sovereign lands during the 1860s and 1870s. These differing histories help us understand why protestors toppled a Grant monument in California, but left a similar statue untouched on the East Coast. Historian Alaina Roberts, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and author of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, will be discussing on a future episode how the federal government both supported new citizenship rights for recently emancipated African Americans, while dismantling sovereign rights of Native nations. For example, at the end of the war, the federal government forced Native nations to free their enslaved laborers and divide up tribal land into parcels. Parcels were given to both black and Native members, but additional land was also sold to white settlers eager to move west.

But history isn’t inevitable and also offers so many “what if?” moments. What if John Wilkes Booth hadn’t assassinated Lincoln? What if Lincoln had selected a different vice president than Johnson, who worked to undermine Reconstruction from its inception? In another upcoming episode, I’ll discuss how President James A. Garfield won the election of 1880 on a platform that advocated racial equality. The opportunity to resurrect Reconstruction and protect African American citizenship was lost when Garfield was assassinated just a few months after taking office. Todd Arrington, the site manager of the James Garfield National Park Service site, will help consider the possibilities had Garfield survived.

Too often, the gatekeepers of American history have ironed out the wrinkly history of the presidency and racism, even as black, Latino and Indigenous scholars and their communities have centered this relationship in their understanding of the United States’ past. Similarly, these uncomfortable narratives don’t make it into history textbooks or break through the never-ending news cycle. For example, many textbooks present Woodrow Wilson as a peacekeeper or a staunch defender of democracy because of his role in World War I and the League of Nations. Yet, while promoting democracy and liberalism abroad, Wilson managed increasing segregation in the federal government, supported white supremacist propaganda, and threw a civil rights’ delegation out of the oval office. Recent Black Lives Matters protests have forced Princeton University, where Wilson served as president from 1902 to 1910, to grapple with this history. In June, the University announced it would remove Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs. Wilson’s support of segregation should be a central part of the national story as well.

Since Americans are rightfully determined to talk about race and the presidency, especially in the next several weeks, we should get the history right. So The Past, The Promise, The Presidency is trying to share this critical information with a broader public in an accessible manner and through a popular medium. I hope you’ll join us.

#History

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plusorminuscongress · 5 years

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New story in Politics from Time: Could Trump Lose the Republican Nomination? Here’s the History of Primary Challenges to Incumbent Presidents

From the very beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump has never really left “campaign mode” — but as the next election gets closer, that approach has turned into a more concrete play for victory in 2020. But Trump is not alone. He has challengers in the 2020 Republican primary, most notably, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, former South Carolina congressman Mark Sanford and former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh.

This campaign is the first time an incumbent president has faced a challenger with name recognition within his own party since 1992, when Republican president George H.W. Bush faced a challenge from more conservative Pat Buchanan — but that wasn’t the only time a sitting President has had to fight for his spot on the ballot.

Before primary elections became the dominant way to pick a nominee, party leaders were more able to either shut down challengers or smoothly pass the nomination to someone else. Notably, four incumbents who were denied the nomination in the 19th century — John Tyler, Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur — had been Vice Presidents who rose to the Presidency following the deaths of their predecessors, perhaps suggesting they’d never won their parties’ full support in the first place.

Both Tyler and Fillmore, who were Whig Party presidents, were denied the nomination because the political battles surrounding slavery: Tyler in 1844, over the annexation of Texas, which he supported but which would upset the balance of free and slave states; Fillmore in 1852 over his support of the Fugitive Slave Act. (Democratic President Franklin Pierce, who ended up winning the 1852 election, also lost his party’s nomination after one term, as many Northern Democrats felt his support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act was too conciliatory to pro-slavery Southerners.) Johnson was the first president to be impeached, in February 1868, so he didn’t get either party’s nomination. And Arthur, who succeeded President James Garfield, was denied the 1884 Republican nomination, though he didn’t actively seek it because he was suffering from kidney disease.

Some of the first primaries were held in 1912. Barbara A. Perry, the Director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, who spoke to TIME as part of a presidential-history partnership between TIME History and the Miller Center, points out that those 1912 primaries were products of the progressive-era populist movement, as former President Teddy Roosevelt unsuccessfully tried to unseat incumbent President William Taft by forming the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party.

Even after that period, not all primaries can be evaluated the same way. In fact, the system in use today is only about 50 years old. Candidates didn’t usually have to compete in all of the primaries until party reforms in the early 1970s made primaries (rather than party leaders) key to determining who gets the nomination.

“New rules make it easier for anyone to run,” says Hans Noel, professor of Government at Georgetown University and co-author of The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform, “but also created more need for informal pressure for making sure things don’t go awry.”

While an incumbent President has never lost a primary nomination in modern U.S. history, these five challengers put up a serious fight.

Truman vs. Kefauver (1952)

Boris ChaliapinEstes Kefauver on the Mar. 24, 1952, cover of TIME

In 1952, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver challenged President Harry S. Truman for the Democratic Party nomination. Even though he didn’t win the nomination, he changed the entire state of the race. When Kefauver won the New Hampshire primary — the first primary of the campaign season — Truman decided not to run for re-election.

At the time, Democrats were bitterly divided. The Northern Democrats had spearheaded the addition of a civil rights plank to the party platform at the 1948 convention, leading the Southern Democrats to form a spin-off “Dixiecrat” coalition. Any candidate would face trouble securing widespread support. “[Truman’s] defeat by Kefauver in the New Hampshire preference primary emphasized that he was not the unanimous choice of Northern Democrats,” TIME reported in its April 7, 1952, article on Truman’s dropping out.

On top of that, once it became clear that World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower was poised to get the Republican nomination, Truman, whose Administration had been entangled in scandals in 1951, realized he probably wouldn’t be able to win anyway. Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson ended up winning the Democratic Party nomination, but losing the general election to Eisenhower. Meanwhile, Truman would tie Richard Nixon for the dubious honor of the lowest approval ratings upon leaving office.

Johnson vs. McCarthy (1968)

Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) on the Mar. 22, 1968, cover of TIME.

While President Lyndon B. Johnson won the New Hampshire primary on March 12, 1968, politicos thought he should have beaten radical anti-war Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota by a larger margin than the seven points with which he pulled it off. “People thought that it was close for an incumbent president and [Johnson] looked vulnerable because of the Vietnam War,” says Perry.

TIME reported that McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary was a statement that was “as much anti-Johnson as antiwar,” citing a NBC poll that found more than half of Democrats didn’t even know McCarthy’s position on Vietnam. Less than a week after New Hampshire, Attorney General Robert Kennedy jumped into the race. Then, on March 31, Johnson announced he wasn’t going to run for re-election.

As TIME reported in the April 12, 1968, article on Johnson dropping out, “So low had Johnson’s popularity sunk, said one Democratic official, that last-minute surveys before the Wisconsin primary gave him a humiliating 12% of the vote there.” But even with Johnson out of the race, his decisions on Vietnam plagued his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee. Protesters took to the street during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to protest the fact that Humphrey won the nomination without campaigning in a primary, and Humphrey went on to lose the Presidential election to former Vice President Richard Nixon.

As a result of this race, both the Democratic and Republican parties made rules changes in the early 1970s that created today’s modern primary-centric nomination process.

Ford vs. Reagan (1976)

Michael Evans; Dirck Halstead; Paul KeatingFrom left: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford, on the June 21, 1976, cover of TIME

The 1976 campaign season was the year in which primaries started to matter more than ever before, and is considered the closest a sitting President has come to losing his party’s nomination in modern history. President Gerald Ford — who was elected to the House of Representatives, but became first Vice President then President thanks to the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon — was vulnerable, thanks especially his unpopular decision to pardon Nixon. The nomination was still up for grabs when the Republican National Convention started in Kansas City, Mo., but Ford eked out win the day before the convention was supposed to end.

That summer, TIME reported that 55% of Americans believed it was wrong for Gerald Ford to pardon Nixon, and that polls showed Republicans rated Ronald Reagan higher than Ford in leadership and decisiveness. But some politicking by Ford’s strategists enabled the incumbent president to edge out his opponent. He racked up 1,187 delegates compared to Ronald Reagan’s 1,070, which was barely more than the 1,130 he needed to secure the nomination.

In the general election, Democratic Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter ended up winning for, as pundits said, being the opposite of Nixon. “Battered by the Vietnam War, Watergate, scandals and abuses in high places,” TIME noted in a cover story that year, “many Americans clearly welcome Carter’s confidence in them and the worth of their country, and his soft-spoken promise to restore a moral purpose to national life.”

Carter vs. Kennedy (1980)

Pictured (center), Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter, (R), puts his arm around Senator Edward M. Kennedy (L) as he arrived at Logan International Airport in Boston on Sep. 30, 1976, for a four-hour campaign blitz.

After Jimmy Carter’s first term in the White House, he got a challenge in the form of Massachusetts U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, the brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Carter won 36 primaries that year, but Kennedy’s 12 victories included important ones in New York and California, and he didn’t concede until Aug. 11, 1980, at the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Unlike his brothers, “Kennedy could not articulate any appreciation of the economic anguish of Middle Americans,” as TIME put it back then.

At the DNC, he endorsed Carter in a sentence and laid out the Democratic Party’s vision in what TIME called “the speech of his life” in his 2009 obituary. That speech was also the launchpad for a new chapter in his Senate career.

Ronald Reagan went on to win the general election, and Carter’s loss made Democratic Party officials think that perhaps they needed to once again have more of a role in choosing the nominee — leading to the introduction of superdelegates as part of the nominating process for the 1984 election.

Bush vs. Buchanan (1992)

Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection—Getty ImagesConservative Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan displaying The New Hampshire Union Leader headlining his triumph and threat to frontrunner and incumbent President George H.W. Bush on Feb. 1, 1992.

When he decided to challenge President George H.W. Bush in 1992, conservative pundit Pat Buchanan never won a primary, but he helped expose a rift in the GOP — thus opening room for Ross Perot to make a third-party run, and arguably foreshadowing Trump’s eventually election. As Buchanan framed the difference between the candidates, while launching his campaign in December 1991: “[Bush] is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the old Republic. He would put America’s wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first.” On top of that, Buchanan and his supporters felt betrayed by Bush’s having broken his famous campaign pledge, “Read my lips: No new taxes.”

Democratic Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton ended up winning the general election.

Does a primary challenge hurt an incumbent?

“The conventional wisdom is that primary opponents harm incumbents in the general election, although this is hard to prove,” says Robert G. Boatright, editor of The Routledge Handbook of Primary Elections.

Crucially, it’s difficult to establish cause and effect when a challenged incumbent loses the general election. For example, embattled incumbents Ford, Truman and LBJ had all come to the presidency either upon the death or departure of their predecessors, the Miller Center’s Perry notes, so it’s possible the public thought they didn’t “live up to the previous president.” And even those challenged incumbents who weren’t in that situation were facing troubles of their own.

“It’s probably not that the challenge itself weakened the nominee,” says Noel, “but the fact that they were weak drew their challenge in the first place. So just being challenged is not a good sign.”

That may be one reason why it’s not more common for Presidents today to get primary challengers, even though the current system of primaries gives party leaders less power to steer the selection process. Party leaders still hold critical sway behind the scenes and can discourage people from running altogether, and, adds Noel, fewer people may be interested in disagreeing with a President from within a party anyway.

“Parties were still big tents and had factions and wings, and now parties are so polarized and monolithic,” says Perry. “If our parties are becoming more monolithic, then who is there to challenge?”

By Olivia B. Waxman on October 10, 2019 at 03:30PM

#Time #politics #PlusOrMinusCongress #±Congress #Indega±#IndegaPlusOrMinus #TimeMag #TimeMagazine

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radioleary-blog · 6 years

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Long Names and Outsourcing Superheroes

It’s not easy writing political comedy.

One factor is the impermanence of a political joke. Even a great political joke has an expiration date, and political narratives change fast these days. Your average political joke has a shorter shelf-life than a pint of half & half that you left in the car. “Honey...when did I write this joke about Trump getting golden showers from Russian prostitutes? Is it still any good or should I throw it away?”

“How does it smell?” she replies from the living room.

“Whew! Pretty funky...I think it’s turned. Dammit! That was a good one.”

“So write a new one,” she says dully, without looking away from whatever TV program has unattractive British servants enduring wretched lives of 19th century drudgery. Which accounts for about half of all PBS programs. Or should I say “programmes.” They’re so depressing. They ought to call it “Downer Abbey.” Or “Upstairs, Downstairs, Blank Stares.” Seriously, man, how much does the BBC pine for the days when the lower classes knew their place? Is that really an era to romanticize, even if they do call it The Romantic era? And who the hell could enjoy watching shows about the help being treated badly? As for me, if I watch even ten minutes of a show with berated butlers and yelled-at scullery maids, I start to get angry. Every time I see some mutton-chopped, inbred Lord of the Manor lining up his staff to lecture and threaten them for poorly-polished silver, or for becoming ‘too familiar’, or for having any normal human desires whatsoever, I have the normal human desire to make him ‘too familiar’ with my fist in his mutton-chop face. Just once, I’d like to see one of the servants he’s giving a good “dressing-down” to turn around and give this privileged twit a good old working-class “beating-down.” I’d like to see the First Footman, or the Second Footman, or some Footman put that foot right up his aristocratic ass.

I was trying to think up some funny-sounding British aristocratic names as examples of noble pomposity, but it turns out they have this new thing called “the google,” so I just looked up some real names instead. These are just a few of the actual descendants of William the Conqueror, who, being British, conquered everything but brushing and flossing:

Flora Paulyna Hetty Barbara Abney-Hastings. That sounds like somebody who never had to fill out their name on a lot of forms. Good luck fitting that on a job application. But of course, nobody with a name that long and dreadfully upper-class ever had to look for work. The longer your name, the easier your life. Hey, I just realized that. I might actually be onto something. Who do you think works harder - a person named Prince Stuart Johann Knud Bernhard Felix Maria René Joseph de Bourbon-Parma (real name), or a guy named Stu Parma? If you’re having trouble figuring that one out, the title Prince is a big clue. The only Prince who ever broke a sweat died last year in Minnesota, and judging by his opioid addiction, it was probably a cold sweat. Stu Parma sounds like an ex-Checker Cab driver from Queens, whereas Prince longname there sounds like an exchequer for the Queen. Big difference between those jobs, and probably all because of the length of their names. Great, just what men need, one more length to feel inadequate about. The only people who work harder than guys named Stu and Kip and Sam are guys with even shorter names like Bo and Al and Ed.

Same thing probably holds true for women, I bet Vikki works a longer shift for less pay than Victoria does. And I bet Kat does things for money that Katerina never would. I’m not thinking sex-worker, necessarily, but if she did it would be all her idea. No, I was picturing Kat doing something more along the lines of a cage-match fighter, or rodeo girl, or tattoo artist. She could set up her own new-school tattoo shop and call it “KATTOOS.” And she’s more likely to be a fun person to party with, too. Kat is a bad-ass who keeps it real, and Katerina will not go down on you even on your anniversary. The longer the name, the less fun and the more stuck up you are. Here’s another real name, and I bet she isn’t bringing any beer or weed to your party: Countess Antonia Charlotte Jeanette Marie af Holstein-Ledreborg. Wow, really? Can we just call you c*ntess for short?

And with the titles and peerage to boot, these names really start to get re-goddam-diculous. Check this guy out, this is a real title: His Royal Highness the Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, Royal Knight Companion of the most noble order of the Garter, Royal Knight Companion of the most ancient and most noble order of the Thistle, Knight Grand Cross of the most honourable order of the Bath, member of the order of Merit, Knight of the order of Australia, companion of the Queen’s service order, member of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Councillors, Aide de Camp to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. WTF? That’s not a title, that’s the whole book! And the sequel! Keep in mind this is just a really fancy way of saying this guy is banging the Queen. This title is so long that when you start saying it you have 13 colonies in the Americas, and when you’re done saying it Cornwallis is surrendering at Yorktown.

But that’s the trouble with those british TV servants, they never fought back against the system like we did here in the colonies. That’s why their rigid class-structure hierarchy remained in place for so long, and they’re still sentimental for it in these godawful butler dramas. They never really had a lot of rebels in England, not for very long anyway, they either came here and started killing Indians, or they got arrested and shipped off to Australia to get eaten by sharks. Even today, British culture doesn’t celebrate the rebel like we do in America. The British never had a ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ more like ‘Keep Calm and Carry On Luke.’ The Brad Pitt ‘Fight Club’ character Tyler Durden sounds like it could be a proper English name, but if there was a ‘Fight Club’ in England, the first rule of Fight Club would be No Fighting.

And hey, did you ever hear Brad Pitt try to do a british accent? Yikes. He has all the range of a veal calf. He sounded worse than Bob Dylan trying to speak Chinese. But strangely, British actors have no problem at all doing American accents. Why is that? In fact, they have taken over a lot of our favorite tv and movie characters. On ‘The Walking Dead’, Rick Grimes, Maggie, Morgan, the Governor, and Jesus are all British. There are so many Brits on the show they should rename it ‘The Ambulatory Deceased’.

And the list includes some of our most beloved Superheroes. Henry Cavill, Christian Bale, Andrew Garfield are English, that’s Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. And even the new Spider-Man, Tom Holland is British. Both Jeremy Irons and Michael Caine were Alfred, which begs the question ‘What’s it all about, Alfred?’ (Ah, you’re too young to get that reference). Two actors have played Professor Xavier and they are both English, so are both actors who played Magneto. Fellow X-Men The Beast, Nightcrawler and Jean Grey, and Avengers Quicksilver and The Vision are British. So are the actors who played Doctor Strange, Daredevil, Commissioner Gordon, The Thing, Mister Fantastic, Odin, Ozymandias as well as super-villains Dr. Octopus, Sinestro, Killer Croc, Col. Stryker, Juggernaut, Toad, Azazel, The Lizard, and Loki. All English. Add to that Ryan Reynold’s Green Lantern is Canadian, while Eric Bana’s Hulk, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and Hugh Jackman’s The Wolverine are Australian. An Australian Hulk? I understand they let Mel Gibson audition to play Hulk. But the Hulk is a rampaging rage monster who smashes everything in sight, and they felt Mel Gibson was just too angry for the role. Plus the Hulk isn’t anti-Semitic. I’m beginning to wonder if we have any American superheroes left, except for the Captain with America right in his name. If Donald Trump is going to bring back jobs to America, can he please start with our superheroes?

But I digress. I don’t remember what my point was, but I’m pretty sure I had one. Oh yeah, British servant shows. Why do women love these Victorian period pieces so much? They’re usually intelligent and independent women, too, yet these butler-laden bodice rippers get them steamier than an Icelandic orgy.

No, wait, I remember my point now: it’s not easy writing political comedy. Reason two, you get distracted. As I just demonstrated with the last ten paragraphs. I was saying the life of a political joke is short, and getting shorter. There was a time before the 24-hour news cycle when a political scandal stuck around for a long time. Watergate hung around for years and years, like an Irish houseguest. Comics in the 1970’s could take months to work out Watergate bits, and if they were solid, you could tell those jokes for half a decade. Fashions and music trends would change before your Watergate jokes got old. The first time you tell your Watergate joke on stage, you’re wearing bell-bottom jeans and a tie-dye T-shirt, and years later you’re telling it on stage wearing a white Disco suit. And it’s the same old joke about E. Howard Hunt, or H.R. Haldeman, or R.L. Stine, or George R.R. Martin, or whoever the hell was involved in the break-in. And actually, it kind of was a Game of Thrones, except instead of a dragon Queen who could walk through fire, you had G. Gordon Liddy who liked to hold a torch to his hand to show how tough he was. If you don’t know who he is, that’s okay, just picture Negan, but high on cocaine and patriotism.

People had better things to do in the 1970’s than obsess on scandals, and the only way to follow it was in newspapers and on the evening news. Which, if you were not home while the evening news was on, tough luck, there was no recording it. And 1970’s people were definitely out, and doing much cooler things than watching the evening news. Like driving around in a Pontiac Firebird and smoking a joint, or going to a Pink Floyd concert and smoking a joint, or throwing a key-party orgy and smoking a joint, or just smoking a joint and smoking a joint. You could do a lot of fun things in the 1970’s, as long as you had a joint. Those were the rules. Even if you got pulled over by the police, you better have a joint on you, the cops will ask you, “Licence..registration...proof of joint…”

So political scandals unfolded at a leisurely pace. Which is not to say people were not involved in politics, maybe it was the draft, or maybe it was the joint, but they were very involved. They were the only generation that ended an unpopular war through protest, and threw a corrupt President out of office. I think it was the weed, because after that, the police stopped making sure you had a joint.

But things are different in the Trump era. If you can call a presidency that only lasts until he quits this summer an “era”. More like the Trump “error”. Trump has a new scandal every day, every fourteen hours to be precise, so by the time you write a good joke, it’s over. It’s old news, and on to the next scandal. Tiny hands, Meryl Streep, grab ‘em by the pussy, Betsy DeVos, Michael Flynn, and now wiretap, the scandals are coming too fast. - That’s what she said! The jokes are obsolete by the time the pen leaves the paper, because by the time you read this, the whole wiretap scandal will be over and he’ll be on to the next inexcusable act. And that will only be like, two days from now.

I realize now that when I write about politics, I’m like one of those monks who make paintings out of different colored grains of sand. It takes them forever to do it, and the minute they’re done, they erase it. And they move on to the next one.

And I’ve never had more fun.

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robinsoncenter · 7 years

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MLK Week Events

Wednesday, January 10

Lecture:

How Racial Criminalization Underwrote America’s New Deal

7–8:30 p.m. | Kane Hall, room 210

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University and is the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Khalil’s scholarship and teaching examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality and criminal justice in modern US history.

Supported by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and sponsored by the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality & Race (WISIR), Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Additional event details here.

Thursday, January 11

MLK Birthday Party

11 a.m.–3 p.m. | Mary Gates Hall, suite 171 4-7 p.m. |Ethnic Cultural Center

Celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.! We’ll have birthday cake, celebratory music, #UWMLKWEEK swag, and t-shirt pick-up for those who registered for a Day of Service project through the United Way of King County.

Saturday, January 13

UW Tacoma MLK Day of Service

10 a.m.–2 p.m. | Tacoma Community House

UWT students, UWT Service Coalition and the Mission Continues join together in a day of service to celebrate MLK Day at the Tacoma Community House. Visit UWT’s Center for Service and Leadership for more information.

Monday, January 15

UW Tacoma

2018 MLK Jr. Unity Breakfast

8–10:30 a.m. | University Y Student Center

The Unity Breakfast was established by UWT Black Student Union to celebrate the legacy of Dr. King and inspire the campus community to continue to work to make his vision of an equitable society a reality. This year’s theme is Stand Up, Speak Out: Reflections on Service & Sacrifice and the keynote speaker is Roslyn M. Brock, NAACP National Board of Directors Chairman Emeritus.

Tickets are $10 for UW Tacoma students ($15 for general public) in advance; $20 at the door.

MLK Seattle

: Community Celebration, Resource Fair, Rally, and March

Times vary and start at 8:30 a.m. | Garfield High School

The Martin Luther King Celebration Committee is composed of dozens of grassroots, labor, business, minority and progressive community organizations and volunteers from the Puget Sound region. Annually, these groups come together and organize our community’s largest tribute to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2018 marks our 36th year honoring Dr. King’s legacy. Please see the event website on how to be involved.

MLK Day of Service

9 a.m.–4 p.m.| Various locations

Each year, the University of Washington — in partnership with United Way of King County — hosts the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, an event that engages nearly 3,000 volunteers in day-long service projects throughout King County. These projects provide vital people-power to organizations that support our county’s most vulnerable populations.

Register for service projects, as a group or as an individual, through Thursday, January 11, by visiting the United Way of King County volunteer website!

Tuesday, January 16

Mobile Black History Museum: ’68

8 a.m.–4 p.m. |Mary Gates Hall Commons

The Mobile Black History Museum brings a new exhibit, ’68, to the UW this year! ’68 features more than 150 original artifacts focusing on the major events and personalities of the anniversary year of King’s assassination. In addition to King memorabilia (including a document signed by him) there is material from John Carlos and Tommie Smith (’68 Olympics athletes), Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Tina Turner, Dick Gregory, The Supremes, The Jackson 5, Sly Stone and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Ashe, Muhammad Ali, The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Shirley Chisholm, The Last Poets, Adam Clayton Powell, the Black Panthers and many others. Historical context is built leading up to ’68 with original material from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Jim Crow era.

Wednesday, January 17

Lecture:

Equity & Difference: Rights, by Megan Ming Francis

7:30 p.m. | Kane Hall, room 120

Please join UW’s Professor Megan Ming Francis for part two of her three-part lecture series that will explore and explain how we got to this moment in our cultural history, what challenges we face today, and how we can build a robust rights movement to meet the current challenges.

This lecture is part of the public lecture series sponsored by the UW Graduate School. Registration information can be found here.

Thursday, January 18

Still Dreaming: A Hip Hop Student Association Showcase

7 p.m. (doors open at 6:30 p.m.) | Ethnic Cultural Theater

This showcase will feature current students, recent alumni and community talent exploring themes of justice and struggle through spoken word, dance and rap. Join us for an evening of free expression and community-building.

Follow the UW Hip Hop Student Association on Facebook.

#080118 #events #volunteer #mlk week

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