Shebang
I segued in this entry on the 15th of December, feeling that descendant futurists, should they somehow stumble upon this digitized diary, presuming they somehow overlooked or failed to discover records from more vaunted historians of the Gen X era, might like a brief note on how some of Americana’s formerly-taken-for-granted institutions adapted during the latter stage in 2020’s heightened states of racial strife, political clusterfucking, and Covid’s persistence.
In the sports world, the Cleveland Indians finally caved. They announced they were changing their name, amid much scorn from the peanut galleries. They became the Cleveland Guardians. Nobody thought that new title would give them a better chance for pennant glory, but Cleveland will take any mojo it can get. That was two down, for those who were counting, including the former Washington Redskins, now the Washington Commanders. Guardians and commanders. You don’t have to be a spud like me to determine how those new monikers might be reminiscent of class trends, amirite whiteboys? Check out my segments on justice for a refresher, if you like.
There are a few grandfathered organizations left standing, including the Kansas City Chiefs (given their current dynasty, a name change isn’t coming anytime soon), the Atlanta Braves (their owners maintain they have the blessings of the local North Carolina Cherokee tribe), and the Chicago Blackhawks (Chi-town insists their team is an homage to Sauk tribe chief Black Hawk).
Concerts and live music were deader than dead. Former attempts at acoustic Zoom offerings dwindled out. For a while over late summer, the drive-in concert milieu was in vogue. Certain spots across America indulged occasional shows offered by working musicians, with stringent protocols in place. Stages in the round, cars parked at least six feet away from one another, patrons had to wear masks if sitting outside their vehicles in folding lawn chairs or in the beds of pickups and such.
Despite our fair adherence to pandemic guidelines, we considered attending one of these ‘car concerts,’ one hosted by Robbie Krieger, the famous guitarist for The Doors. Eventually we nixed the idea, because bathroom breaks seemed a gauntlet. Individual visits to on-site porta-potties were advertised as being supervised by event staff, but porta-potties during a pandemic just didn’t seem to be a safe thing, what with their confined space, precious little ventilation, bio waste piling up inside.
Public restrooms in general were shunned throughout the epidemic. How many times did you see cars pulled over on highways with folks relieving themselves, standing or squatting, during your limited travels that year? If you drove through the main byways of LA or San Diego during the months of summer of 2020, I was likely one of those men standing dick in hand, back to traffic. Apologies for the public scene.
Other valiant attempts at live entertainment were waged by Covid weary comedians, mostly notably Dave Chappelle, who hosted pop-up, one-off gigs in and around his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio. He figured out a relatively safe way to continue working, with Covid precautions like temperature checks, masks, seating sections six feet part. It was still a risk. It’s not like comedy was an essential service. Though in that year of blight, perhaps it was.
Musical icons Van Morrison and Eric Clapton sadly chose to err on the side of the tin foil hat tribe in regards to Covid. They mourned the potential death of live music (hardly; if anything, people continue to attend, en masse, live music concerts and tours here in 2024, most notably with Taylor Swift’s Eras tour). They released a joint anti-lockdown song called Stand and Deliver, in which they opined how we were embracing slavery to big government and how we needed to be free more than we needed to be alive.
Actually, protecting our fellow citizens over our personal interests was about as free as freedom gets.
It was hard to swallow the fact the UK whiteboy duo – Morrison an Irishman, Clapton an Englishman – behind the anthems of Brown Eyed Girl and Layla were hopping the revisionist bandwagon, but there you had it. Whiteboyism isn’t limited to the unwashed Americans, and the famous can be as dumb as the anonymous.
A new Covid stimulus bill passed in the House. It included extended unemployment benefits and a direct payment to all qualifying Americans for $600. Six hundred bucks? Also in that bill, was 4 billion allocated for weaponry upgrades to the Navy, 2 billion for weaponry upgrades to the Air Force, 500 million to foreign aid for Israel….and you, Joe Q. Public American Citizen, got $600…that on top of that big windfall of $1200 back in May.
Additionally, 5 billion in aid was marked to assist music venue owners, theater producers, and varied cultural event centers who took that drastic hit in business because of the necessity of all of us having to avoid crowded places. The reality was, any institution in the hospitality industry was always going to get the shortest stick in that pandemic draw. Of course, it sucked some musicians and venues were going to lose their livelihoods.
Here in SoCal, we ran the risk of losing legendary settings like the Whisky or the Troubadour. Shit happens. All that mattered, all that’s ever mattered, is that we saved as many lives as we could. Businesses went under. Entire industries teetered on dissolution. We could rebuild, reboot, recover, and if that didn’t happen in the exact same manner as we were enjoying before, we’d find something else to do, some other job to work, some other path to take. That’s fucking life. It changes. Life takes precedence over all else.
That includes my ability to attend my favorite amphitheater or movie house. If landmark venues fell, I would mourn them and miss them. Not as much as I’d miss all those lives, those precious stranger lives, that deserved to be lived even if it meant sacrificing my favorite spot to rock. And geez, rich old whiteboys like Van Morrison and Eric Clapton crying about the music industry? Gimme a break. They were both 75 years old at the time. They had their careers in the rear-view already, and even if they never step foot onstage again…that was okay. They got more than 99% of musicians ever do.
Cinema took the next big hit after music. Movie theaters could not be patronized for obvious reasons, what with their enclosed spaces, side by side seating, and re-circulated air. Few movies were issued a wide release in standard theaters those last nine months, especially tent pole offerings. Most were rescheduled to 2021. The AMC theater chain, a fairly major American conglomerate, reported they were close to shuttering all their theaters. Indie movie houses across the country closed doors for good. The movie industry itself suffered tremendously, with a massive workforce unemployed, beyond marquee stars who could afford to weather out a pandemic.
The movie going experience was already diluting the last ten years or so, with the proliferation of home theaters and streaming services and increased quality of network TV. I revel in the theater experience. I have a favorite movie house I’ve been patronizing for forty years, ever since I saw my very first movie as a kid (Return of the Jedi). It’s called the Arlington Theater, a two thousand seat performance hall with old school velour cushioned seats and an old timey pipe organ that comes up from under the stage, its halls decorated in faux Spanish architecture and a painted night sky on the ceiling, giving patrons the quaint perception of lounging in a Mexican outdoor venue. I’ve seen countless flicks there, many dozens of concerts, plays, benefits, lectures and award ceremonies. It is absolutely a staple of my existence, one of my holy grounds. I would be devastated if it ever shuttered. But yes, businesses which subsisted on disposable income were always going to be damaged the most in a pandemic.
The landscape of television changed. Viewership levels were at an all-time high, for the exact same reasons movie theaters were empty. Entertainment at home remained almost our only option for distraction, outside of Mother Nature. Original scripted content was limited. For the first six months of the pandemic, late-night hosts stuck to quarantine, broadcasting monologues and Zoom celebrity interviews from their homes, wherein we became familiar with the likes of Stephen Colbert’s wife Evie, or Jimmy Fallon’s kids, or Seth Meyers’ sea captain. Some portions of scripted shows resumed production, incorporating the pandemic into story lines, actors in character wearing masks on the usual cop/doctor/lawyer shows. Saturday Night Live returned to Studio 8H, with guests and the current cast testing on a weekly basis.
Sesame Street aired specials like The ABCs of Covid 19, with our favorite Muppets versing children in the new era of pandemic life. TV commercials necessarily adapted, with advertisements including liability warnings about precautions in the offered product’s manufacturing, storage, production, and the risks of shipping delays. Ads for food delivery services like Grubhub, Door Dash, Uber Eats, and Postmates were plentiful. TV adapted more than any other medium for evident reasons. We were all indoors. TV was our primary outlet for concourse with the outside world, prismatic a lens as it was. Not that that it was too wildly different from the average American lifestyle before the pandemic. We’ve all been stuck to the tube at night for decades. Especially Gen X.
I touched on porn early on in this pandemic journal, loyal readers may recall. The amount of deepfake video being produced in those days was staggering. Much of the adult content seemed to focus on fetishes of powerful female figures, both in real life and in fiction. I’ve certainly watched my share of porn over the last half century, same as any other American whiteboy, but the deepfake thing was a clear violation of person and privacy. There was a proliferation of prominent celebrities falling victim to amateur CGI tactics of small-time fanboys who apparently harbored deep-seeded issues with depictions of strong, capable, powerful women. Those most often targeted seemed to be actresses who’d portrayed popular heroes in a successful movie franchise. Most distressing were hack jobs on younger actresses who seemed to have invoked a long-term obsession among computer nerd types who felt the need to objectify those young actresses after they ‘came of age.’ Yuck. Obviously, such ‘artistic expression’ should be illegal. Appropriating others’ imagery without consent to satisfy a sexual fetish is a back-alley operation.
Why would men would render x-rated depictions of iconic characters like Black Widow and Wonder Woman? It’s the patriarchal thing, in all its ugly glory, where women of power drove an impulse in certain male types to create content with themes of overt, forced sexualization, to make themselves feel more powerful than those they were shaming. It wasn’t limited to actresses, either. The alt-right establishment’s bogey-woman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was a frequent target of such cyber-weaponization. The depths to which we’d sink in trying to arrest Cortez’s rise to power reached as high as the Oval Office and as low as the forty-something incel in his mother’s basement splicing and dicing movie footage and interviews to adequately render a realistic depiction of an attractive, United States congresswoman having group sex.
And before you ask, no, I didn’t click on any of those deepfake videos. That isn’t in my wheelhouse, nor have I searched for iCloud leaks of private photos from celebrities. If they didn’t provide consent for the public to consume such material, it ought not to be patronized. Yes, all my cards on the table, back in the day, I checked out the granddaddy of all tawdry real-life porn when it first leaked to the ‘net…Pam and Tommy’s video. It was sociologically fascinating, but it didn’t do much for me, and I regret doing so, seeing in hindsight how it affected Anderson, who’s an impressive advocate for PETA and has earned my respect. I’m quite certain my primal urges don’t spark without consent. I’m weird like that, in being among the tripods of earth. I know. I’m a goddamned saint. I’m really not. When it comes to porn, I remain firmly situated in the 80’s, spandex, hair spray, the whole shebang. Yeah, it seems like that’s a wordplay given current context. It’s not. Honest. Shebang is a Civil War era word for ‘rustic dwelling’ or ‘hut.’ Haven’t a clue as to why that became a long-term metaphor.
I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas that week. Without my two elder dogs at my feet, it was a morose affair. I wept. I’ve caught that animated special on broadcast TV every single year since I was old enough to watch TV. It’s sentimental every time, mostly because it reminds me of all those I’ve lost, those who have sat with me in past years as I viewed the annual offering. I didn’t want to watch it that year, actually. I knew it would bring the blues. I can’t seem to skip Charlie Brown’s Christmas even if I’m not in the mood. Sentiment’s a potent drive. Yeah, we’ve definitely been over that, haven’t we?
It might suit some to know, lest they think I’m bearing a double standard, that if I thought ending my annual viewing of the Peanuts Christmas show would save even one Black or Brown life, I’d do it without hesitation. Perhaps at some point we’ll examine the underlying whiteboyism in annual Christmas broadcasts. They do skew pretty damned white, let’s face it. Peoples of color are sorely underrepresented in nearly all of them, including Charlie Brown’s world, where the only Black kid was often consigned to a background role at best. As attached as we may be to yesterday’s tokens, if they must be archived to the vaults to expand diversity and inclusion and representation, then so be it. That’s part of evolution.
We were more bound to our preferred news talking heads than ever before. Depending on which side you leaned toward, unless you were impartial enough to look outside American boxes far enough to tune into the likes of the BBC or Al Jazeera, you almost certainly formed a kind of distant brotherhood or sisterhood with your television mouthpieces who’d been feeding you the daily pandemic scoop for the better part of the year.
In the era of Covid, cable news became more a lynch pin for populist rhetoric and progressive claptrap than at any point in American history. CNN and Fox News were near omniscient in their ability to sway both public and federal perception. The pandemic gave cable a brand-new height to its soapboxes. For those who think I’m double-barreling partisanship, that I’m a lefty in denial, I’m pretty impartial when it comes to the tube. I sampled the Fox guys. Honestly, it seemed like every time I tuned in, they were always talking about how the world’s out to get them (and you), how afraid everyone needed to be of the end of an illusory 1950’s America that never existed, how godless commies and woke socialists were ready to destroy everything we hold dear.
It was just too much fear without warrant, too much opinion without substance, simple yet rampant whiteboyism whipped up to paranoid degrees. After a while, talking head rhetoric sinks in. It’s pervasive. That’s what they want. Culturalization through repeated exposure. There are algorithms for this stuff. You might ask what might be the difference in what I’m doing here, with all these words and tenets, many repetitious. Aren’t I just hitting the same nail with the same hammer?
It’s a fair point.
Think of it like this.
For every one person who’s managed to get a leg up that ladder of consciousness, there are ten more dragging their feet. My concern is that if someone is a foot-dragger, they’re hampering my track as well as theirs, because we have to do it together, not apart.
Emotional evolution is a rough road, not for the meek or the easily distracted, but it’s a road we all take, some sooner, some later. There are no off ramps, no exits. All we can do is speed up or slow down.
I am part of your evolution, same as you are part of mine. Evolution by its very definition implies a collective move forward, just as devolution directs a communal step backward.
It’s up to each of us to decide how quickly we want to get to our destination.
*Compiled from December 15, 2020