Q Toon: Diss Belief

MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid opened her program last Saturday by apologizing for some posts which apparently appeared on her weblog in the '00's — or perhaps some hacker managed to go back in time and put them there. She "genuinely do[es] not believe" that she wrote them herself.

In the posts on her now-deleted blog, which lives on on the Wayback Machine, she (or her impostor) refer to Senator Lindsey Graham and then Governor Charlie Crist as "Miss Lindsey" and "Miss Charlie," alluding to rumors of their closeted homosexuality. Other posts complain about "Brokeback Mountain" and two men's lips meeting in a Snickers ad that ran during the 2007 Superbowl. There's also a post making fun of Harriet Myers's supposedly lesbian hair-do.

“In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” Reid said. “The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.
“Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries,” she continued. “I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.” 

This kerfuffle has the aura of having been generated to distract interested parties away from more significant media misbehavior (say, e.g., Sean Hannity's intimate relationship with Team Trump). Twitting Graham, Crist, and others for rumors of homosexual orientation is fairly common (who, me?); and when Reid's supposed posts about them were dredged up last December, little notice was paid to them.

So someone kept digging and came up with the Brokeback and Snickers stuff, which make it sound as though she believes us LGBTQ folk need to keep our PDA's private. If the posts are genuine, they call into question Reid's ally cred with LGBTQ issues (PFLAG is rescinding a Straight for Equality award they were planning to give her next week). If they're not, it can only mean that Russian, Breitbartian, or Gallifreyan hackers are sophisticated enough to fool the various experts who claim that the posts can't possibly be forgeries.

Gay journalist and Glenn Greenwald is one of the people pushing the Joy Reid allegations. Perhaps his buddy Edward Snowden can clear things up for us.

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Meanwhile, as followers of this blog know, I draw my syndicated cartoons several days before I post them here; so this week's cartoon was created without the foreknowledge that Kanye Kardashian-West would be under fire this week for musing that 400 years of slavery was a "choice."

I think Ms. Reid is probably relieved that Kanye is not in her corner.

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P.S.: Nothing on the internet ever really dies.

Friday Night at the Movies

(This is an old essay from my Geocities site, resurrected for the hell of it.)

I hear that one of the reasons "Brokeback Mountain" didn't win Best Picture in 2006 is that the actual winner, "Crash," is about Los Angeles, which all the actors and writers and directors who live out there and vote for Best Picture can relate to, and none of the characters in "Brokeback Mountain" ever come close to setting foot in a big city.

I can sort of understand that. Now, I don't live in wide open country, and I don't live in a big city either. I grew up in a small town of under 100,000 people, and now live in an even smaller village of about 5,000 (about 10 minutes away from the small town). The small town, Racine, was once portrayed in the Goldie Hawn - Mel Gibson flick "Bird on a Wire" as having a Chinatown in it; I can assure you that it doesn't. But the people who make films live in cities that do have Chinatowns in them, and perhaps they can't relate to a city without one.

So anyway, as a gay man, I'm supposed to have liked "Brokeback Mountain" for the gay content alone. I'm supposed to like "Will & Grace" for the same reason, even though I have a really hard time relating to its characters. I understand the dynamic between Will and Grace, and perhaps once upon a time between Will and Jack; but most of the time, I can't figure out why these characters hang around each other at all. And yet, in spite of the shallow one-dimensional characters and the substitution of attitude and name-dropping for wit, "Will & Grace" managed to win an Emmy.

Was Hollywood's snub of "Brokeback Mountain" a way of making up for the overhyping of "Will & Grace"? Were the voters telling us "You're here, you're queer, get over it"? Well, maybe. Or maybe the Academy would have prefered a movie in which Jack Twist went to Hollywood, got all famous and went to fabulous parties and did cocaine and completely left Ennis Del Mar pining sadly away back in Bumfuck, WY until some tearful reunion scene as Jack, dying of AIDS, returns to his roots to die. Or better yet, Ennis shows up at Jack's palatial estate, because that would be in L.A.

Well, I'm sure "Crash" is a very fine movie. I wanted to see it when it was in the theatres, but it wasn't here in East Boondocks, WI very long, and my partner wasn't interested in seeing it at all. None of the best picture nominees were on local screens for more than a week (I don't think "TransAmerica" played here at all). The only Oscar nominees for 2006 we saw have been "Brokeback Mountain," "King Kong" (technical awards), and "Capote."

And, being from East Boondocks, I can't say I really care all that much about what film gets the Academy Award For Best Picture. A couple of years ago, we saw both "Saving Private Ryan" and "Shakespeare In Love," and do you remember which film won Best Picture?

Heath Ledger eventually got his Oscar, posthumously, for his role as the Joker in the Batman flick, "The Dark Knight." We watched that film recently on TV... it's not exactly a nuanced performance. But then, an actor gets more acclaim for playing Richard III than for playing Henry VI. In a way, Ledger's award was just like those Lifetime Achievement Awards the Academy gives to tremendously talented actors who never got a statuette for their best work.

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P.S.: You know what else I liked about "Bird on a Wire"? Gibson and Hawn get to Racine on the Detroit-Racine ferry.

The Detroit-Racine ferry?! Come on, Mr. Hollywood Room Full of Monkeys at Typewriters! Was I-94 supposed to be closed? Detroit and Racine are not even on the same lake! Why the hell would there be a ferry going all the way from a big city on the southwest shore of Lake Huron, clear around the lower Michigan peninsula to a little city on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan?

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For an additional movie reference to Racine, there is also "Autumn Leaves," starring Joan Crawford, Cliff Robertson, Lorne Green and Vera Miles. 50ish Crawford marries 30ish Robertson, who has told her that he's originally from Racine, but tells the wedding authorities in Tijuana, Mexico, that he was born in Chicago.

I've found that whenever I'm abroad and somebody asks me where in the U.S. I'm from, I might as well say I'm from near Chicago. My reasons aren't as sordid as Cliff Robertson's; foreigners (and, I suppose, Hollywood film makers, too) just aren't likely to know where Wisconsin is.