Stunned and bored is a bad combination

Interesting cutout. But what’s the blob at the center all about?

 Can’t watch the news right now. Even Trump, fighting for his life and ours, looks bored.

You have no idea how much I rely on what I call Serendicity. My own portmanteau word combining serendipity with Jung’s synchronicity. When I can’t take what’s going on, I shift into a female mode of going passive on my couch and trusting the 570 channels with nothing on to show me what I need to see, chosen almost entirely at random. Works amazingly well. Always has.

I’ve given up on the MAGA megaphone for awhile. No more War Room right now. Do love that Natalie Winters. Brains and articulate fury Bannon has lost the knack of. Anymore he reminds me of Bill O’Reilly, a man of dubious literacy who mispronounces things and keeps reminding us he went to Harvard at some point. O’Reilly went to the Kennedy School of Government, Bannon to the Harvard Business School, meaning they come from Harvard’s two worst graduate schools, where good grammar is not to be expected and they have little idea what they are claiming as a prestigious credential.

I know I’ve been hard on women lately, but they’re so everywhere, so in charge of everything that even the few heroes we can look to are mostly female. Hence Natalie Winters and Julie Kelly and Naomi Wolf and MTG and that firecracker on OAN and Sharyl Atkisson and Donna Fiducia… and you know what I mean. Are they going to go crazy again like they’ve done in the past, what with Ann Coulter and Megyn Kelly and Naomi Wolf and MTG, or are they going to go suddenly crazy at some point in the future like all the women Trump has had on his WH staff when somebody waves a big enough check or gigolo in their direction? I’d love for them to be heroes, but going nuts for no good reason is a distressing pattern that undermines my capacity for trust. And I could go on and on (and on) about the Powerful Black Females who seem to have taken over the federal government, the justice system, the once best universities, and the loudest seats in Congress and mass media. They can’t deliver a diagrammable sentence, but they can shout down every political opponent they’ve identified as an enemy of wymynkind from the superior race.

Back to Serendicity. I pick movies and TV series to watch almost at random. Sometimes I strike out four, five times in a row. Sometimes I get lucky. Two ways to do that. Find a good one that reminds you there is still talent and thought in the world. I stumbled on movies called ‘Rememory,’ ‘Valley of Shadows,’ ‘Spoor,’ ‘Beyond the Trek,’ and ‘Stake Land.’ They were all good, two them foreign, which doesn’t bother me even though I don’t like illegal immigrants. Go figure. One of them was the most beautifully composed movie I have ever seen. 

Another way is to go for reality show series, not the kitschy pretty face kind but the down low kind, meaning mostly unscripted cops and paranormal expeditions. 

Over the months and years we have seen most of the episodes of the old “Cops” series and its descendant “On Patrol Live,” supplemented with Brit shows focused on CCTV-based law enforcement, the hellhole called Manchester in the U.K., and American bodycam and courtcam episodes.  An education. The good news? Things are worse in Britain than they are here. Nighttime streets out of control and cops crippled by rules of engagement that require them to be polite regardless of provocation. Appallingly violent drunken brawls every night at closing time with serious injuries from fists and knives. Few arrests, constant warnings, detainees for vicious acts held overnight and released in the morning. The crumbling of civil order to a very great degree. 

The bad news? It’s almost that bad here. Not just London and Manchester but states all over the nation, suburban and rural counties that are far from New York and Chicago. Traffic stops in which there isn’t even the pretense of obedience to the police but unending tides of foul language, wild accusations, irrational violent resistance against being cuffed, and the usual un/half dressed perps of both sexes. An incredibly high percentage of traffic stops involve drivers who have no licenses, auto registrations, or insurance, and almost invariably the cops smell marijuana through the driver window, find meth, heroin, fentanyl, or glass crack/meth pipes in the car, as well as open containers of alcohol. Amazingly, everyone lies, claims they’ve done nothing wrong, and want badge numbers so they can sue. All the men have pants falling off their asses, and the often scandalously dressed women are almost as violent as the men and react hysterically when the female cops remove packets of meth from their panties.

No one is raising the kids anymore. They don’t even care about being arrested when they are, except for their reflexive twisting, kicking and spitting when the cops go handcuff them. A standard joke of the “On Patrol” emcees is the incredibly high percentage of people who talk themselves into getting arrested when the cops would prefer them to accept their ticket and leave quietly. They just don’t know how to stop themselves from resisting, running away, driving away, and continuing flight even after their tires are flattened by the stick strips. And a great many of the cops don’t know when to stop talking themselves while situations escalate out of control. The California cops are afraid to do much of anything but call more and more backups when situations get complicated. People in general sense the timidity and reticence of cops to get tough with them. They have lost their respect for authority.

We’re not talking about the so-called lower classes here. We’re talking about what used to be the sturdy, well behaved middle class citizens as well. The drug problem is huge and omnipresent. The country is falling apart from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Washington DC isn’t the only crisis afflicting us.

The point of solace for me has been the paranormal reality shows, of which I viewed episodes of nearly every series, and there are a lot of paranormal series. The ones relying on reenactments are easily dismissed as trick effects photography, but the ones that are chronicling overnight or multi-day lockdowns are as fascinating as they are frequently boring. The anecdotal evidence from these shows for ghosts or ‘spirits’ interacting with the living is overwhelming. I’m not going to argue the point further here, except to insist that real fear is distinguishable from fake fear, and the intervals of waiting for something to happen are often too long to be explained away as the cleverest part of a hoax. The investigators do get terrified, and local history research often matches up convincingly with what they are experiencing in some old house or institution. 

I like these shows because the participants are able to talk with each other without yelling, and they spend a bunch of time waiting for some attempted contact to bear fruit, which makes them ideal for sleeping to. I have several shows I rely on in that way. (Dead silence is unhelpful to my sleep regimen. Too dead when you’re seventy.) Turn them on, roll over, and wake up at odd hours as old people do when some weird incident or noise interrupts their waiting. If you watch the ones who prove they’re not fakes but really searching for proof of afterlife it’s impossible not to believe that there are haunted places, and some true evil abroad in the world.

But… one gets bored all the same. With cops and ghosts. Last night, for example, I opted for a rare resort: music. Rock is too loud, classical is too periodical with its wakeup-inducing crescendoes. So I decided to give a listen to the current Queen of Pop Music, Taylor Swift, whom I’d never really paid much attention to. Still haven’t. She’s perfect to sleep and/or doze to. Which is the reason for this report.

What’s happened to music is the same thing that’s happened to everything else. All the men are gone or 80. What’s left is the girls who are half costumes and half auto-tune. I half-listened to hours of Taylor Swift recordings last night. Ever try that?

What I half-heard was a completely average voice without much distinctive or compelling phrasing, lyrics that really seemed to be the same song hour after hour, namely the dullness and disappointing characters of men, the handling of what purports to be love as an itch that needs to be scratched a lot before it has to be scratched raw and healed by a breakup.

Taylor Swift is no Madonna, and I always preferred Blondie to Madonna anyway. She’s not even Lady Gaga, and don’t mention Winehouse, the doomed American Piaf.

Taylor Swift is the equivalent of all the cloned baked bean cars that have made me lose interest in automobiles altogether. They may be faster than they used to be, and they’re certainly far more expensive, but they have no sex appeal and are not individually memorable, let alone distinguishable from one another.

Why is she such a big deal in America’s pop culture? She’s as steady and predictable and politically correct as a Prius. But to my mind she’s no fun at all.

How did we get to this point? 

Thinking maybe sex appeal is obsolete in WokeWorld. That’s stunning to me. Also boring.

I dunno. Does this Breitbarf post help explain anything?

A transgender Harvard professor is boasting about a new course, titled, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” which began in February at the Ivy League university.

“It is [Swift’s] world and we live in it, and I think her art makes the world that we live in better and more interesting,” Harvard English professor and “diehard Swiftie” Stephanie Burt, who teaches the new course, told Harvard Magazine.

“This is an English course, which means that we focus on the arts that use words,” the professor continued.

“It is a course focused on a songwriter, which means that we look at how the words that she uses interact with the music that goes with them, and the way that she sings and performs them, and how they go out into the world and get heard,” Burt explained.

After being asked to respond to “the controversy that people have surrounding the idea of teaching Taylor Swift academically” at Harvard, the professor said, “Some of the controversy is based on a misunderstanding of what the course is.”

“And this misunderstanding, I think a little bit of it comes from people who think that it’s now possible to major in Taylor Swift at Harvard,” Burt added. “Because the word course in Britain and in some other parts of the anglophone world means what we would call a major or a concentration.”

“We will move through Swift’s own catalogue, including hits, deep cuts, outtakes, re-recordings, considering songwriting as its own art, distinct from poems recited or silently read,” the description reads.

“We will learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts,” the course description adds.

As Breitbart News reported, Harvard is not the only university teaching a course on the jet-setting climate change activist who backs Democrats. Swift courses are also being taught at UC Berkeley and University of Florida.

Burt’s class on Taylor Swift also covers “queer subtext” in the pop star’s songs, according to the course description.