With a sort of bemused detachment, I turned on the Grammy Awards show last Sunday night, but only after the wife and I had watched an episode of BBC crime drama (this time, Inspector Lewis, on Amazon’s Firestick) as is our Sunday evening custom when football is not in season. BBC crime dramas (i.e., murder mysteries) always leave us scratching our heads as to whodunit. Mostly because we can’t understand colloquial British English without turning the TV volume past eleven, and even then still miss a good third or so of the conversations. Maybe we should start watching the BBC with closed captioning. But we’d still not know all the slang, colloquialisms and idioms, even if we knew the words on the screen and what they ordinarily meant. Such is the nature of language. Only four hundred years or so since the American/British split, and we can barely understand each other, even as we have been in constant communication the entire time. We indeed are ‘two countries separated by a common language’.
I turned the volume down when I flipped it over to the Grammys. There is currently a second British invasion of popular culture underway, particularly in music and movie stars, to rival the first of the modern era (the Beatles, Rolling Stones, James Bond, et al, in the sixties and seventies), though the invaders this time like last mostly learn to lose the harsh edges of their accent when they arrive (except Keith Richards, maybe, but who can ever understand anything he mumbles?). So, I didn’t need to turn up the volume to understand James Corden, a British comedian (London) with an American late-night talk and variety show, who was hosting the awards gala. He sounds just British enough that you can’t mistake his origins, which is good for him, because we Americans are presently in love with British accents (people with British accents usually play the smartest person in the room for whatever gig is involved), but not so British as to render him indecipherable.
I tuned in just in time to see Adele pull her diva/drama-queen act, and stop mid-song during a George Michael tribute because the song wasn’t being played/sung properly. Or, maybe that was why she stopped. Who knows with her? Maybe it was all staged to generate interest in her Grammy appearance going forward, for it was quite unusual. If every improperly sung or played song at the Grammys Awards Show was stopped mid-song to correct the mistakes, the show would last a whole week.
Adele got all teary-eyed, saying that since it was for George it had to be perfect. So they started again from the top. To my ears, the retry sounded exactly like the first stab—a badly-done arrangement of one of Michael’s songs (Fastlove) that sounded more like a dirge than the hard-thumping but soulful tune from the ex-Wham! lead singer that it is.
I sort of liked George Michael back in the eighties, after his Wham! days, when he went solo. Faith is one of the better and more memorable of all the music videos and songs of the era. And a nice sentiment. And Father Figure is just plain hot, even if it’s a little bit creepy, like De Niro in Taxi Driver, or Sting, in Police’s Every Breath You Take.
Why, pray tell, should Adele be singing George Michael songs? Michael danced and sang to up-tempo, sultry rhythms. Adele is the fat white lady (it’s always a fat white lady, this time, most appropriately, with a British accent) who has to sing before the show is over. She’s got a good enough voice, but hardly so good as to be worthy of her narcissistic diva-ism. It occurred to me that the same phenomenon that produced Adele produced Donald Trump. And the tears. Please, with the tears! She made a George Michael tribute into a display of her touching sensitivity. Mariah Carey aint got nothing on her.
About a half-hour before the show’s end (just before I changed the channel), Busta Rhymes, fronting the group A Tribe Called Quest (perhaps the best band name ever), went on a rant (or maybe sang a song—it was hard to tell) about “Agent Orange”, referring to President Trump.
Imagine if some country music band had, at a music awards show eight years ago, done a rant about Obama, derisively using some physical attribute of his to refer to him, perhaps calling him Burr Head? The outcry would have been thunderous. And yes, Burr Head would be a racially-motivated derisive. Just like Agent Orange was.
As the Grammy Awards Show attests, Trump’s election is the best thing could have happened to the Left’s many disparate identity groups. Blacks can now protest and riot without the embarrassment of doing so while one of their own sits in the White House. Migrants, illegal and otherwise, now have someone to focus their energies and hatred upon, even as Obama deported more illegal aliens than any President in history and Trump has not done anything more than implicitly support his efforts by promising to extend them. Women mustered a march just to protest the possibility that Trump might one day grab someone’s pussy. Or, I think that’s what they were protesting. It’s never easy to tell with women.
What an amazing reinvigoration of the myriad identity groups comprising the Democrat party that Trump has instigated. Had Hillary been elected, they’d have been relegated to continuing to whine about the obstructionist Republican Congress. If nothing else, Trump is the evil face that identity groups need to keep their minions inspired and agitated. It’s much easier and efficient to protest one person than a faceless institution.
But the real winner in all this has got to be the Left’s media outlets. Which makes sense. They helped put Trump in office. Why shouldn’t they be the ones to primarily benefit? The New York Times, the Left’s leading media outlet of record, averaged probably three articles a day after Trump was nominated for the Presidency by the Republican Party. Since the election, and particularly the inauguration, it’s been at least a dozen. Some of it is to be expected as just ordinary news that any Administration would generate. But that’s hardly all of it. Trump loves the limelight and the New York Times, and others like them, are happy to shine it. It gets ‘em lots and lots of clicks. Trump may well save the Old Grey Lady.
And there’s no way that late-night comedians and Saturday Night Live will ever be able to repay Trump for all they owe him. It’s sort of how Obama’s election was a godsend for gun and ammo manufacturers and the National Rifle Association (too bad for them now).
I later learned that Adele swept all the major awards—album of the year, song of the year, record of the year (though it’s hard to see where there’s any distinction between the latter two). Beyonce didn’t. But Adele apparently disagreed with the awards committee, saying Beyonce should have won. It was surely an act of feigned humility, intended to further endear her emotionally to her fans. And she cried again. Good grief. She’s so sappy and egocentric, she ought just run for President. She’d make something of a perfect opposite to Trump—the same in every respect—narcissistic, always looking for attention, etc., except as a caricature of a female instead of a male. But she’s British. And I’m pretty sure foreigners are ineligible. Even ones here on a valid visa. At least for now.
But I bet we would elect a Brit if we could. What do people and societies do when there’s nothing to look forward to? We look back. Old people reminisce. Societies fetishize history, obsess over their progenitor cultures (like we in the US are doing over the Brits), and concoct origins myths.
The most potent origins myth in the modern age is that that the US was founded by men interested in creating a democratic, egalitarian society of free people with inalienable rights. The founding fathers would likely split their sides laughing if anyone could ask them whether they meant what they said in the Declaration of Independence. If they were honest (and why wouldn’t they be honest, considering they’re dead?), they’d explain that in the phrase, “all men are created equal” they very obviously meant “only men of European ancestry with property”, i.e., the 1% of their day, i.e., them. They never imagined that people would take them literally. The preamble to the Declaration was just a grandiloquent rationalization for cutting Mother England from her share of the profits that the vast richness of the land produced. It was never about promoting freedom or equality among all people, yet that’s the Kool-aid we’re drinking today.
The next night, as I was watching Jimmy Fallon’s monologue, mostly about the Grammy awards the night before, I heard the NBC chime and saw a news scroll across the bottom of the screen warning of breaking news. Unlike my local broadcasters, who are continually interrupting programs for their dire warnings, usually of severe weather, which translated, means anything from mild thunderstorms, to a dousing of snow, to a hurricane, to an F5 tornado (we get our share of weather calamities in Central Alabama, which fact local broadcasters use to continually warn us of weather events that aren’t calamitous), the national broadcasters rarely interrupt programs for breaking news. So I thought this might be something serious. It wasn’t. It was to tell me that Michael Flynn had resigned from the National Security Agency in the Trump Administration.
He’d apparently lied to the Vice-President about the nature of his conversations with the Russian Ambassador during the campaign, so had to be let go. At least that was the official story. I’ve no doubt that the official story is an attempt to create an instant myth, like the risible myth of the motivations of our founding fathers all those years ago, only more immediate. All myths have a kernel of truth somewhere embedded (smothered?) within the pack of lies surrounding them. So, it’s probably true that Flynn lied to someone. But then, he’s a political animal (like all senior military officials are), all of whom could be tried and convicted every day for lying. Like their close cousins, lawyers, lying is what political animals do for a living. That he lied does not an explanation for his firing make. Was he thrown under the bus so that the Administration might cover up something more nefarious than a telephone call with a Russian ambassador?
Alas, there’s no way to know. Russian involvement in the election is under investigation by the FBI and other agencies, but the investigation is classified. We’ll find out what happened when the indictments come down, or perhaps not, if either they don’t come down, or are considered so sensitive that they must be issued secretly.
The classified nature of the investigation into Russian involvement in our election did not stop the New York Times from running an article based on leaks from people involved in the investigation. They must believe that Trump’s presidency is so potentially dangerous that collaborating with lawbreakers willing to compromise confidential information on matters of national security is a risk worth bearing in defense of the republic. Or, they know that running a story whose sources risk indictment for Espionage Act violations would likely get them a whole bunch of clicks.
Imagine how bored the Left would be if Hillary had won. The coasts owe a debt of gratitude to the heartland for more than just providing their food and oil and coal and steel and cannon fodder. They owe them (us) for having relieved them of the terrible ennui that would have beset them had the same old corruption carried the day. Now, all the Left’s various identity groups have a reason to be, a passion for action.
From the heartland to the Left, we can unapologetically say, without tears or claims that Hillary should have won, “You’re welcome”.