Monday, December 14, 2020

Those Holiday Movies

 So I promised to write every day. I Lied. It's just that there is so much bullshit to sift through its hard to get my balance.  Yesterday the TV miraculously went on and was tuned to MSNBC, my news channel of choice -  not really - its just that all the networks do happy news and its hard to be happy when another 3000 people died, and are dying everyday.  Anyway Ali Velshi was in Michigan watching trucks leave the lab with the Covid vaccines. As it happens he was interviewing an expert on immunizations who was talking about how it took seven years to develop the covid vaccine, not seven months.  Because the research was based on Ebola and Sars data. At some point while the Dr. was talking, Velshi said, “We need to take a break from this discussion to see the trucks leave the lab. Its an historic event.” 

Whats wrong with this picture?  It is seriously warped to call trucks leaving a lab, Historic. Its kind of like the “breaking news” label.  Everything is "breaking news."  My guess is the label is supposed to make people think that they are going to hear something unusual, important, even startling.  That is never going to happen because when everything is soooooo impactful, then nothing's impactful. This is why people cannot possibly take the news seriously.  Right now there are several kinds of “news.” Happy news, Entertainment news, and Biased news, depending on what you read and what you watch.  Probably the closest you will get to real news is PBS, but even that information can be editorial rather than facts.  For those of us in the receiving side,  all this bullshit information is simply noise.


Now let’s talk about real news.  As many of you may remember, Hallmark and Lifetime holiday movies, are among my favorites.  The casting in the past has been pretty much plain vanilla. By that I mean Handsome straight white people. But in the past few months there has been a change.  The lead characters are sometimes Black or even Asian, and even interracial and .....hold your breath... sometimes they are gay.  Lifetime movies are a little more overt with their single sex couples. Also, not all the people are attractive. Sometimes they are downright unattractive or on the pudgy side.  What a relief. All those years that we aspired to be perfection zapped in a single holiday season. Here’s a fact:  The absence of people of color was noticeable. What was more noticeable was that most of the people of color (black asian,brown, red) looked like handsome white people with lots of make-up. It cannot be that I am the only person who was disturbed by this.  


Anyway, those movies should probably be boycotted but I simply cannot resist the totally mindless entertainment in this fantasy/other reality, with the same script repeated in every single one of these dramas, whether they are happy or sad.  They don’t touch my heart, but the good news is that they also don’t touch my mind.  Happiest holidays. We're just sayin...Iris

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