Dear American News Media: It’s Gut Check Time… Are You Up To It?

April 19, 2019April 19, 2019 ~ Mulligan Jesus ~ Leave a comment

I’ll admit it straight up. I’m a “news addict”. I keep my office TV tuned to the news (mainly MSNBC) most of my waking hours. In between I’m tuned in to the same place via satellite radio and my phone. I dare not look away.

I don’t watch for the news — except for the “breaking news” when it first breaks (and not for the subsequent five hours of its “breaking”). I watch because I’m a concerned citizen deeply concerned that the Fourth Estate is not living up to its Constitutionally mandated responsibility. I watch like a canary in a coal mine — squawking its head off because the environment is deeply, deeply toxic and will kill us for sure if we don’t stop.

Yesterday — with the drop of the redacted Mueller Report — the American News Media were handed a kind of Magna Carta. It’s an imperfect foundational document that must be the basis for how America begins to handle the cancer gnawing at our vital systemic organs. Our News Media will not see it that way. They’re not deep enough. They’re not insightful enough. Their idea of analysis can’t possibly plumb those depths because it can’t take in the required perspective.

If not for journalists and citizen journalists (Seth Abramson should be nominated for sainthood; so should Sarah Kendzior & Jennifer Cohn and a host of other relentless pursuers of the truth), the US might have already slid past our Democratic Event Horizon — the point beyond which our Democracy could not be pulled back from the black hole of Republican Corruption. If not for David Corn’s advocacy of the Steele Dossier, while it might have still made its way through legal channels, it would have done so with a hell of a lot more pressure caused by the very criminals it was identifying.

There ARE journalists & writers & thinkers who’ve understood this story — its nature and its core truths — from the get-go. They’re a small club.

It’s a core truth: take any profession you like — the overwhelming majority of people working in it will be proficient. Good but not great. Let’s call them what they are: “Mediocre”. Like any other group, the journalism profession is filled with mediocrity. Unfortunately, these here times need something better. Voila la probleme!

I’m a storyteller by profession. My IMDb profile reflects a fraction of my professional storytelling life. The point of my mentioning it: I’m not some piker. I’m not just another guy out on the internets shouting ignorant Jeremiads into the wind. I’ve actually made a buck or two doing this thing. In a world where anyone with a blog can be an “expert”, I may not be “an expert” (let’s call that subjective), but I can sure point to a few examples to suggest I “might” know what I’m talking about.

When it comes to storytelling, I know my shit. Trust me on this.

With that in mind — I’m offering these suggestions to our chums in the Main Stream News Media. I’ve worked under journalistic restrictions. I’ve had to back up my shit. This is about storytelling — with purpose.

Here are your problems in a nutshell:

FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
An addiction to “BOTH SIDES DO IT” thinking
Normalcy Bias

The first is the killer — and FAILURE OF IMAGINATION is the flaw that leads to the other two problems. I’m not sure it IS solvable. Maybe it’s just the case that you’re born with imagination or you’re not. Mediocrity turns most journalists into the proverbial blind person feeling up an elephant for the first time and trying to make sense of it. It’s outside their range. Then, in the midst of their confusion, they start to analyze — using not solid data but their own fuzzy perceptions. Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?

Frequently, watching them, I perceive a veal thrashing against the confines of its box.

An example from the recent past — in order to explain Donald Trump’s “inexplicable” behavior, whole round tables of journalists and journalistic fellow travelers would often “put themselves in his shoes” in order to explain his behavior. Problem invariably was — each well-meaning but clueless nitwit tried to explain Trump’s narcissistic, sociopathic actions through the lens of their own behaviors. They were explaining Trump as if he was them.

Result — “analysis” that was miles away from the truth — even further away from being of value. How like bullshit! It’s all first rate — and so much of it!

To analyze Trump you have to get inside HIS head. To do that, you have to use your imagination. BUT — the way journalists are supposed to do it — they use their imaginations based on deep, background knowledge of their subject. They can point to multiple instances of past behavior to justify projecting similar behaviors forward in a different (more recent) context. It’s exactly what they’re doing now — projecting future behaviors based on past — except based on the right character (Trump) not the wrong one (them).

I withdraw my “must be born with it”. I just demonstrated — American News Media CAN use their imagination. They just have to WANT TO…

I don’t think I’m alone in pointing to “BOTH SIDES DO IT” thinking (“thinking” should be in quotation marks too) as part of American journalism’s core problem. I would love to know where it came from — where it started. Was this disease born in some American journalism school and then spread outward like typhus or dysentery?

Guys like Chuck Todd are the deans of “Both Sides Do It” journalism (“journalism” should be in quotation marks too). “Both Sides Do It” — by its nature — fosters the creation of False Equivalences. Inequal things get equalized. Bernie Madoff, we all agree, is a thief. By the same token — thievery being thievery — so is the character Jean Valjean from Les Miserables (or, for you “kids”, Les Mis). Madoff stole BILLIONS. Valjean stole bread.

In Chuck Todd’s world, “both sides did it” — both sides STOLE. Proportion plays no part. All facts have the same feather weight.

It ain’t so. And every “journalist” who thinks this way is betraying their Constitutionally mandated duty.

NORMALCY BIAS infects us all. No one is immune. That’s why you have to be hyper-vigilant about it. Something in us aches for “normalcy”. Normalcy equals safety, security. We hate being on edge 24/7. It’s wearing us out. We want normal back.

Wishing won’t make it happen though. When things aren’t normal, we need to point them out — and if they’re harmful to us (like, say, CORRUPTION is), we need to REFUSE to EVER allow them to be normalized. Yet here we are. Normalization is a process. We didn’t just drop here, magically transported. We walked here.

If not for normalcy bias, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign would have ended the day it began. It would have died stepping out of its trench — going down in a hale of “Mexicans are rapists” bullets. But Trump’s campaign didn’t end that day. It continued — because the press covering the story let it continue. Rather than put their collective foot down and DEMAND what the hell he meant — not being satisfied till he admitted the clear, obvious truth: he meant HE’S A RACIST and A BIGOT — the American press accepted Trump’s behavior as “different”. This was just “how Trump was”.

Just like that, racism and bigotry had been normalized.

Now, granted, “pussy-grabbing” got short-circuited by Wikileaks dumping Hillary Clinton’s emails, but even the emails (in point of fact) were a Republican-backed crime that the American News Media couldn’t wait to normalize and use to their own advantage. Let’s be quite clear — the principle vector for transmitting stolen Democratic emails & internal data was the American News Media. They were literally working at Russia’s behest each and every time. You don’t have to be witting to be a useful idiot.

Russia used our news media’s Normalcy Bias to get them to carry Russia’s message-water.

That has to stop.

What has this done to us? How has American News Media’s failure hurt us?

Well, for starters — as I just said — it’s undermined our concept of “Truth”. We’ve put its definition up for grabs like a jump ball. But the Truth isn’t subjective.

There is Core Truth. We need our news media to focus its limited skillsets on getting to it. My simple (if not very humble) suggestion is this: “Keep asking WHY?” Do not accept any “WHY?” that doesn’t get to the very, VERY bottom. It means more “WHY’S?” need asking. No one — NO ONE — ever does things for “no reason”. A person doing terrible things may not be able to adequately articulate what’s driving them — but “something” is driving them other than “that’s just how they are”.

In the case of Donald Trump, American News Media, it means he doesn’t do what he’s doing because “he’s different”.

You saying “he’s different” means “you suck at your job”. That’s a problem for us. For two plus years, you have failed for all the reasons above to TELL the most important story you will ever get to cover and any of us will ever have to live through. While “crazies” on the left gnashed their teeth about Russia, the American News Media turned up its nose. Even as they described treasonous-sounding behavior (Trump meeting with Putin sans a single other American), they assumed it must be “normal” somehow because the President of the United States was doing it — and so therefore it must be “normal”.

As recently as last week, actual “journalists” were questioning if the Mueller Report would contain anything of value. Actual “journalists” were ignoring how AG Bill Barr had used grammar and a damned footnote to bamboozle them into proclaiming right along with Trump that there was “no collusion”. Apparently the meaning of quotes that start with a [bracketed] first letter didn’t get taught where American journalists went to school…

Barr Summary w highlights

Apparently they never learned how to read footnotes either…

Our News Media were handed a kind of gift yesterday. They were given insight into massive corruption. They were given actual perspective.

That is their gut check: Will all those mediocrities gumming up the American News Media be able to use perspective. Hell, will they even recognize what it is?

I worry for us.

How Failure Of Imagination Kills…

February 1, 2019 ~ Mulligan Jesus ~ Leave a comment

When the forensics get done on our Time — and the Big Question gets asked — “How in the world did Americans let such an obvious criminal & traitor 1) get elected & 2) remain in power so long?

The answer will complicated with lots of moving parts (requiring actual calculus to figure out). One of the biggest moving parts will be the Republican Party itself and the monstrosity of its actions here. But the fact that they were complicit — in ways that even predated Trump’s takeover of their party (think Mitch McConnell & his refusal to even talk to Merrick Garland) goes right back to the heart of my premise. We “didn’t see it”.

In real time, Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans did something no other Senate had ever done before — held a President’s SCOTUS pick hostage. Mitch’s excuse was so phony it should have physically hurt every ear that heard it. It was Bullshit On Steroids: “The American People should get to decide who the next SCOTUS judge is”. The American People in that equation are the ones who VOTED FOR BARACK OBAMA and made him POTUS — the guy charged with doing that very thing.

Yet here we are. No Merrick Garland. Neil Gorsuch instead. Funny how the rules work when you make em up as you go along — AND GET AWAY WITH IT.

With all this press going at this story like sperms going at an egg — you’d think someone would have gotten through already and “fertilized” that egg. And yet — with a mountain RANGE of evidence staring them in the face, the Press seems blind to it. It’s there — they kinda know it is — and yet they can’t bring themselves to go and report it. It’s like they just can’t “trust” themselves and what they’re thinking. What they “know”.

This is how “FAILURE OF IMAGINATION” works. Under normal circumstances where everything’s normal — failing to think with imagination won’t hurt you (not much anyway). You can always muddle along in your mediocrity enjoying the status quo until you don’t.

But this here ain’t “normal”. Not even remotely. Gawd, I hope that’s not a revelation. Laws weren’t written to deal with our particular situation. This wasn’t “imagined” by the Constitution’s framers — a flat out treasonous POTUS and the flat out treasonous political party supporting him (the framers didn’t even want political parties; they happened because we’re human and tribal by nature). See how our problem is “outside the box”?

The solution to our problem will have to come from “outside the box” too. Part of our problem is — the criminals are using our rules to undermine them — as part of the whole Cyber War they’ve been waging against us as we sleep. We’re miles behind — in large part because we’ve been so damned slow to SEE what was happening.

Not slow to SEE, so much, really, as GRASP. We saw all this happening — but failed to grasp what it meant — and how it was playing out in all its terrible detail RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. That, too, is failure of imagination.

FAILURE OF IMAGINATION is how McConnell got away with circumventing the will of the American People to deliberately remake the judiciary as conservative when the people CLEARLY want it progressive?

HOW has Donald Trump gotten away with HIS shit for as long as he has? How did we ever let him get past “Mexicans are rapists” or “Pussy Grabbing” or every stinking lie he’s told from the moment he became OUR EMPLOYEE? How have we not been able to stop this — or even report this accurately?

I’ll let you fill in the blank — with an “Amen!” chaser.

But it isn’t just OUR failure of imagination — as citizens. We rely on our Press (as per the First Amendment) to be the final check on power. To do that they need to IMAGINE the worst — because you can’t report all the possible reasons things happen if you don’t include that. For one, you’re not being accurate.

But — strangely — watch enough news, and of all the possible answers to The Biggest Question Facing Us — Why Does Donald Trump Act Like Vladimir Putin Owns Him? The American Press STILL refuses to answer the question: “BECAUSE VLADIMIR PUTIN OWNS HIM”.

It seems bizarre that one can’t “imagine” the thing that’s not just “staring you in the face” but stabbing you there, too.

Fer F*ck’s Sake, America — They’re Just WORDS!

October 28, 2018October 28, 2018 ~ Mulligan Jesus ~ Leave a comment

George Bernard Shaw put it this way — ‘The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.”

Not that every Brit is Shakespeare — that would be a slight over-statement — but regardless of how profane they are by nature most Brits are a hell of a lot better at using the language to express themselves; it’s a subtle thing — having to do with not only word choices but just a general facility with the language itself. Britain’s is a more literary culture by nature and history. On the surface, its obsessions seem fuddy-duddy & Old World. Colonial even. And British culture is all those things — for better and worse.

One of the better cultural obsessions is the language. Brits are no match for the French when it comes to compulsive defensiveness regarding their language — the French have ‘L’Acadamie Francaise’ overseeing the language, literally allowing or not allowing (the most usual outcome) new words in. English (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) has 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 ‘obscure’ words in more limited use. French, by comparison, has 100,000 words — roughly half as many. But (this is significant), each French word has an average of 3 definitions! Words are less descriptive by nature and more (my French professor at Vassar put it) “analytical”.

English literally grows every year as new words are added or coined. French doesn’t do that. Instead of inventing new words (or bringing foreign words into its vocabulary), it adds definitions or puts old words together to form a kind of French Language Pretzel. Even so — the French are simply proud of their language and see it as part of their cultural bulwark. That pride translates into not just a love for the language but an overall sense that how they say things is part of who they are — as individuals and as a culture.

Boy, was that long-winded.

The point is — The French and the English (among others) are far more connected to their languages than Americans are to English. We almost seem to speak English for lack of anything else to speak. Consequently, we Americans always seem more at odds with English than at peace with it. It’s more an obstacle to expressing ourselves than a tool.

If George Carlin had been English, he would never have conceived of ‘The 7 Dirty Words’. It wouldn’t have been on his radar. Yes, true, you couldn’t say any of those words on the BBC either, but it wasn’t because they quaked at the sound of them as we seem to. Even in public spaces, words that shock Americans get aired regularly. The broadcast moratorium on them is decorum and not the threat of legal action.

Here in America though, those words are always an issue. An example — I refrain from using the word ‘F*ck’ here on this blog. In order to be part of any possible ad revenue stream (such as there is one), one has to avoid using certain words. The title of this blog puts me in a hazy zone of quasi-acceptability. For all our ‘freedom of speech’, Americans sure seem intimidated by certain words.

And that’s the point (finally!)

Americans are intimidated by their own language. It goes beyond ‘swear words’. To a degree our sensitivity to oppressive words (the ‘n-word’, ‘kike’ (being a Jew, I get to use the word — how it is), et cetera is appropriate; it recognizes how certain words become weaponized. Those words are always aimed at specific groups — they are weaponized — and need to be seen as weapons.

We’re not talking about those words. It’s like comparing sex and rape. Not the same things as similar as they are in form.

Americans — being less comfortable and at home with their own language — have a terrible habit of using English to obscure truth rather than reveal it. Want to know what I mean? Listen to anyone in Congress yak away for 30 seconds. On average, they’ll use about 50 words when 10 would have sufficed. All those extra words add fog to the mix and not clarity.

When a Mitch McConnell is forced to answer questions, Mitch is a master at using words to completely misrepresent what he’s really saying. He gets away with it easily because so few Americans — including and especially our news media — are comfortable enough with the language to blow past its chaff to get to its wheat. If, after Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or Devin Nunes or Jim Jordan or Mike Pence or (especially) Donald Trump overtly lied to the public the media called their lies ‘LIES’ as opposed to ‘other points of view’ — we would begin to strip these people of their power to misuse and abuse the language.

Our cultural discomfort with sex-related words flows straight from the repressive religious prigs — the Pilgrims — who came here less for religious freedom than because their religion was just plain wacky — and the Church of England wanted them gone. It seems to be a constant among humans: intense religious feelings and sexual repression are soul mates. They go together like peanut butter and jelly, yin and yang, republicans and corruption.

This twisted unease with sexuality expresses itself in perverse ways. I think I ‘got it’ about American culture when I was a kid. I don’t mean that certain words and images were ‘restricted’ — I mean that those restrictions were symptoms of a deeper, darker dysfunction. A vivid memory from my youth: I’m in high school — a huge Kurt Vonnegut reader. ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ is a seminal book in my development.

Back then, the media stone age, there were 3 networks: ABC, CBS, NBC. That’s it. On the night in question, CBS is running the last night of its multi-night mini-series ‘HELTER SKELTER’ — the story of the Mansion Family and the Tate-LaBianca murders. NBC counter-programmed the premier broadcast run of the film version of ‘Slaughterhouse Five’. Two ‘events’.

I didn’t care about ‘Helter Skelter’. I cared about ‘Slaughterhouse Five’. But I did flip back and forth a little — because the last part of ‘Helter Skelter’ is the most compelling: the murders themselves. Here’s where it got weird — and where we, as a culture, revealed ourselves.

On CBS, if one watched, one could experience a dramatized but nonetheless horrifying version of an actual event — murder, bloodshed, unspeakable cruelty.

On NBC, if one watched, one experienced a profound anti-war movie that spoke directly to the human condition. I am absolutely not making a judgement about one story good, one story bad. Both were excellent, valid stories that needed to be told. But one revealed the very worst of us and one wanted to speak to the best in us.

At the end of ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, Billy Pilgrim, the hero (he’s ‘unstuck in time’ — able to travel between various moments in his own life including his own birth and death) visits a time in his life when he’s a ‘prisoner’ in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. There, he’s been put into a comfortable enclosure that he shares with a well known adult performer Montana Wildhack; the two are meant to breed — which they do.

While ‘Helter Skelter’ climaxes with chaos and mayhem, ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ climaxes with Billy Pilgrim imagining a terrible war crime — the Allied bombing of Dresden, German during WWII — being reversed: the firestorm goes out as the bombs that caused them fly back up into the Allied bombers that dropped them. The coda to this vision is Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack in their enclosure — Montana having just given birth to their baby.

Montana puts the baby to her breast and feeds it. She breast-feeds her baby (a hopeful symbol — feeding the future). But, because the shot involved actress Valerie Perine’s naked breast, it had to be CUT.

So — on CBS: murder and mayhem in horrifying (but valid) detaili.

On NBC: Breastfeeding babies is verboten.

That, right there, sums us up. It sums up our culture. It sums up our attitude toward language. You can describe in all the detail you want on the American public airwaves ways to kill people.

Don’t you DARE however, describe all the ways you’d like to LOVE people.

What the f*ck is the word for ‘that’?

‘Both Sides Do It’ Is As Dubious As It Is Dead End

October 12, 2018October 12, 2018 ~ Mulligan Jesus ~ Leave a comment

American journalism has multiple issues that prevent it from doing its job correctly. Corporatism’s up there but we can’t blame corporatism for ‘Both Sides Do It’.

I’m curious — Is ‘Both Sides Do It’ (the market version of ‘False Equivalence’) actually taught at American journalism schools? Is that where the Chuck Todds & Alex Witts & Andrea Mitchells & Wolf Blitzers & Chris Cilizzas of the world learned to ditch all analytical thinking and simply assume that all things are indeed equal? They certainly couldn’t have ‘learned’ that from actually studying reality. Or living in it.

The first thing ditched when a journalist tacitly accepts that ‘both sides do it’ is PROPORTION. They could (and the Chuck Todds ALWAYS DO) ask the dopey ‘what if’ — “Well, what if this otherwise completely illogical, unbelievable thing were true…?” The next thing they do — if there’s a shred of similarity — is “See? Both sides DO do it!”

Yeah, Chuck Todd, they do. Hey — didja know that humans and fish both ‘breathe’? They do! Both sides DO IT! Of course, humans breathe air and fish breathe water but — that’s a minor detail, right — at least it always is where your storytelling is concerned: “BOTH SIDES DO IT!”.

Let’s try on proportionality. A man who steals because he is hungry vs a man who steals BILLIONS because he can. Both men are thieves; BOTH SIDES DO IT. The proportions aren’t quite the same though.

If journalism is an inquiry into The Truth, then any journalist taking up the mantle that ‘Both Sides Do It’ has just cut their vision of The Truth in half. Maybe more.

Any journalist even ‘thinking’ that ‘both sides do it’ is a journalist who’s already left the building.

Bad enough as ‘both sides do it’ is as an ‘analytical tool’, it’s a hell of a lot worse as a basis for action — as in ‘both sides do it so here’s what WE should do…’. There’s nothing of substance where the ellipse now is. You can’t take ‘both sides do it’ and create actions to stop both sides from doing it. It’s a dead end description — in addition to being inaccurate.

The way it almost always works — no, ALWAYS works — is we all turn to Liberals, Progressives and Democrats to ‘be the adult’ and step back from the precipice first. No one ever looks to conservatives to make the first move because they know — compromise is not in any conservative’s DNA. There’s a reason they’re conservative: They want to CONSERVE something — the past is my guess.

Every time they compromise though, a piece of that past gets wiped away forever. It’s no more than a memory now… . Conservatives know that. Newt Gingrich did. newt-gingrich That’s why his revolution allowed no compromise. Compromise wasn’t just failure, it was extinction. In response, Newt launched the full-on Culture War that got conservatives so crazed they thought joining forces with RUSSIA was an okay idea. They thought taking Russian money and serving Russian masters was preferable to compromising with progressives.

Think about that.

One side does it for a specific set of reasons. Conservatives and republicans ‘do it’ because they know the demographics are against them. THEY ‘do it’ because their ideas appeal to fewer and fewer people — most of whom, it so happens, look just like them. Conservatives do it because they dread losing power; they know it will never come back to them. Not if Democracy works the way it’s supposed to…

Which brings us to Mitch McConnell — the man who has single-handedly destroyed the US Senate — the man who stood in the way of Barrack Obama telling America in September that our election was under attack from Russia — whose aim was to make Donald Trump president.

Mitch McC

Mitch, it turns out, has been taking Russian money forever… As in MILLIONS of it. And we thought he was only the Koch Brothers’ lackey… Silly us. Mitch literally robbed Barrack Obama — AND EVERY AMERICAN WHO VOTED FOR HIM — of the SCOTUS pick THEIR VOTE WON THEM.

‘Won’ them. Or is winning different when Democrats do it?

DO both sides do what Mitch did? No, both sides do NOT. I rest my case.

Sometimes, It’s BEST To ‘Think Like’ A STORYTELLER…

July 14, 2018 ~ Mulligan Jesus ~ Leave a comment

If you want to have a shot at being a successful storyteller, you need to have a better grasp of how people actually tick than most other people.

Storytellers who don’t get human beings right are soon employed doing other things — storytelling being out of their range.

As any reader or audience member can tell you: The instant a character behaves out-of-character? The game’s over and the reader or audience member has already turned on you, hating you for wasting their time.

So storyteller HAVE TO get people right or they won’t be storytellers for long.

If you bore in on the PEOPLE in THIS story — who they really are, why they really do the awful things they do — it’s not hard at all to figure out what’s going on here.

Vladimir Putin isn’t a mystery. He’s a professional spy — a SPY MASTER in fact, a conservative with a religious streak in him a mile wide. What he WANTS isn’t a mystery either: He wants to restore Greater Russia to a place of ‘prominence’ and power. Putin also wants more money (cos, apparently, he’s not nearly rich enough).

And Putin wants Russia to be a player.

Donald Trump isn’t a normal president, he’s an abomination. He’s a liar. He’s a TRAITOR and a thief.

Donald Trump’s family aren’t normal either. They’re all corrupt.

Mitch McConnell & Paul Ryan aren’t patriots, they’re POISON.

As any storyteller will ‘tell you’ — real human beings almost never do whatever they do ‘just because’ or ‘for no reason’. They may lie about why — even to themselves — but there is almost always a very real ‘WHY’ — and if you can bore down to that, you will understand virtually EVERYTHING there is TO understand about that character.

The natural progression from understanding how a character REALLY works is to see how they ACT & REACT while being part of a story. Are they the protagonist or the antagonist? Is the story theirs or someone else’s? Or is this a story that will ‘become’ theirs as it gets told?

The process of telling a story is the process of revealing who a person or a group of people really are. The whole point of telling a story is to follow a character arc that describes in incredible detail who a person really is — and why they really do what they do.

If the storyteller flubs any of those details, they’ll hear about it. Audiences’s are just as attuned to how people really are as the storytellers; they want storytellers to remind them how people are, to reveal them in interesting new ways that play with storytelling conventions. They want to see the world as they understand it — albeit with a few twists that expand their understanding of people and the world.

That’s what too many of our Journalists — storytellers all — continue to get terribly wrong. They refuse to see all the characters in this piece for who they really are — falling into the trap of trying to describe non-normal characters in ‘normal’ terms instead. The audience is starting to get antsy though…

We know the MSM storytellers are missing it right now. They keep insisting on story elements and character details that just don’t ring true. Because they don’t describe people (and characters) as we KNOW them.

The story of Donald Trump, the Republican Party & Election 2016 is only just beginning to get told correctly — with the perspective it demands.

Massive, Big stories are more complex, have more diverse characters with more diverse reasons for doing what they do. It’s why hewing to storytelling basics are essential. WHO are we talking about? WHAT do they really want to accomplish within the context of both the larger story & the smaller one? And, most importantly — WHY?

The Truth is, we already know WHY Donald Trump has done what he’s done. He’s a narcissist and a fool. He’s an egomaniac and a phony. He’s a danger to everything we hold dear.

He’s the second worst thing to ever happen to America. How he came to hold the reins of power in his tiny, orange hands — THAT’S the REAL story of our time…

The Republican Dream: TWO AMERICAS

July 1, 2018July 1, 2018 ~ Mulligan Jesus ~ Leave a comment

Clarity.

Ya have to give the Republican Party full bonus points for having ‘Clarity’. They know EXACTLY the ‘kind of America’ they want our country to be. Too bad it’s 1850 America.

The republican party aspires to live in a White, Christian, Male Dominated World.

Demographics do not line up with that world any more. They never actually lined up back in the day. Maybe that’s why ‘certain people’ were considered only ‘3/5 of a person’.

Literally EVERYTHING the Kochs & the Mercers have paid huge money for would FIX America in a perverse hybrid world that ‘lives’ in 1950 but wishes it were 1850 — complete with slavery. Republicans want the rich to get richer and everyone else to get poorer — approaching a kind of economic slavery where our function is to produce goods we can no longer afford to buy ourselves.

Beyond that however is the CULTURE WAR declared principally by the Anti-Abortionists for whom ‘Life’ is sacred only in the abstract. Their single-minded loathing of women’s vaginas and reproductive organs has reached a state of virtual & perpetual psychosis.

Mitch McConnell’s whole power grab — the denial of Merrick Garland and, now, the rush to fill Justice Kennedy’s ‘sudden’ vacancy (this story is going to get ugly, uglier, ugliest) — was centered on filling as many SCOTUS seats as he could (ditto as many other judgeships.) And the goal of that is to outlaw abortion, birth control, immigration by un-white people and on and on and on.

Where abortion is concerned, the intent is to throw it to the states so that each state would have its own birth control rules & regs (the ultimate, ultimate goal is to turn EVERY state into a replica of Salem, circa 1600 where women know their place and keep to their place). But, before we get to Salem 1600, we’ll go through a long, tortured patch where some states have kept abortion legal while others haven’t. Women NEEDING abortions in the anti-abortion states will head to the nearest state where their HEALTH CARE NEEDS and their decision to be or NOT BE a parent can be answered in the way that best suits THEM.

This cultural division of course will go far, far beyond just abortion and birth control. Repressive, Chritian-ized States will experience an extreme Brain Drain. It’s a ‘no-brainer’.

States on that side of the cultural divide will put creationism in their science classrooms — exactly like they’ve dreamed of doing. Creationism in a science classroom will NOT produce science students who can complete in the Real World. Rather it will produce fools, Magical Thinkers and incompetents. The people who pass through its doors will be set up for failure. And fail they will — as will their states — from top to bottom.

Want a little taste of it? Look at the ‘Kansas Miracle’.

Within a generation, there WILL be Two Distinct Americas — the one that lives up to its promise and produces greatness because that’s what diversity does.

The other country will look a lot like the very shit hole countries a certain president loves to call out — while doing everything in his corrupt power to turn US into THAT.

“Karma’s A Bitch” – MITCH MCCONNELL EDITION

May 10, 2018April 3, 2019 ~ Mulligan Jesus ~ Leave a comment

When the end of this story gets written, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be seen as one of its Primo Villains. Mitch has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Russia (via his PACS — totally legal — until the context becomes TREASON). He’s worked hard, hard, HARD for his Republican Donor Class benefactors — the Koch Bros. He literally STOLE a SCOTUS pick from a popularly elected (and rightfully elected) POTUS in order to hand it to a POTUS ‘elected’ by Russia.

Mitch even went out of his way to keep all this a secret from We The People (the ‘Gang Of 8’ meeting at the WH — September 2016 — the IC informs 4 GOP Congressional leaders & 4 Democratic Congressional leaders that Russia is actively trying to swing the election to Donald Trump – and Mitch McConnell says that he won’t tolerate informing the American People – that he’ll insist Obama is ‘politicizing the intelligence’). Mitch insisted WE stay in the dark while his party conspired with a hostile foreign government to pull off a soft coup d’etat.

That’s some pretty awful Karma Mitch has created. Hmmmmmmm… Bet it means — when that Karma boomerangs — as Karma always does — that it will fly back at Mitch with a real vengeance.

Now, if I were ‘In Control’ of Karma — and I could create a ‘Karma Tree’ that would guide all of Mitch’s future incarnations — based on what he REALLY deserves — Mitch’s Karma would go something like this…

Mitch dies (hold off on breaking out the champagne — for now). And he comes back as THIS — ‘Mitch McConnell: Toilet Brush‘ —

But here’s the ‘rub’ — ‘MITCH THE TOILET BRUSH‘ lives HERE —

Yeah — even worse than ‘The Worst Toilet In Scotland’…

A lot worse, it turns out — because THIS is the REFUGEE CAMP where Mitch’s Toilet lives — and CHOLERA just broke out all across the camp…

Yeah — CHOLERA.

And there’s already a LINE to use Mitch’s Toilet (and every last person in line has EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA) —

And that line goes on…

And on…

And on…

And STILL, it gets worse for Mitch — Cos THIS is the creature at the very endof that line…

And it doesn’t make ‘dainty’ piles like THIS —

Nope — it produces an endless stream of foul-smelling poison as toxic as Mitch’s ‘soul’.

And just as Mitch sees how massive and unending that STREAM OF LIQUID SHIT IS—

He wakes up — and realizes it was all in his head — A DAYDREAM!

And that makes Mitch happy (even happier than Koch Money does when it lines his pockets — and that’s a lot of happy).

Everything, Mitch realizes, is back to normal. And he turns to go about what he was doing (before that awful daydream) and he reaches out TO SHAKE THE HAND of THIS MAN —

And the KARMA TREE starts all over again…

Forever and ever and ever…

Karma — call me — I bet we can work something out…