MountainMornings

This morning I asked the Bride if this is the first Thanksgiving we won’t be together. She reminded me that when she was in Paris during college we were apart.  “Ah yes,” I said laughing, “but you had your brother!” 

And this year we have her brother!  We are in California with the Rocker and Ms Cait, and since the Groom couldn’t leave his new post, the Bride and her family will stay in Nashville. Our Big Chill group has been splintering lately too, lots of new grandbabies to welcome into the world. Congrats Al and MJ!

It’s been fun exploring the Gold Coast with Bob. Thinking aloud about retirement, after all it’s been all of two weeks so far. What would it be like to live among the dream weavers of Southern California? The climate is great, the fish is fresh, the people seem happy! But our grandbabies would be so far away.

So we play the If – Then game. If we live in Nashville, then Nana gets her heart’s desire. If we live in Santa Barbara, then Pop Bob gets to walk on the beach every day. 

Bob likes to say, “If my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather.” Tacky I know,  he picked up that little ditty from his father, who liked to point out the stupidity of playing an “If – Then” game. Like for instance, whoever thought that IF Mr T ran for President…he might win?

Which brings me to the latest fiasco of newsworthiness – the controversy over a certain CNN news crawl. You know the header under talking pundits on a political show that’s trying to give the American people both sides of an argument. Only my side, which I might call “extremely liberal” and others may call “progressive” was pitted against the “alt right” sometimes called the “alt Reich.”

Never mind that the majority of citizens fall into a huge bell curve in the middle of those two extremes. We seem to have elected a President who David Duke endorsed, who settled a multimillion dollar lawsuit over his fake university, who is being charged for raping a 13 year old, and who thinks Breitbart is the news leader. Have you noticed that nobody’s talking about emails anymore. 

“If Jews are People”

That was the header under CNN while talking heads debated the pros and cons of their political pendulum. And just like Shakespeare might have a dream within a dream, the nightmare continued with the headline “CNN Sees Twitter Backlash Over If Jews are People Headline Crawl.” Like the only thing that went wrong here was the poor intern who typed in that chyron. Let’s all pile on social media shame shall we?

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cnn-sees-backlash-jews-are-people-headline-chyron-949834

Because the writing has been on the wall this whole time. Mr T doesn’t like reporters unless he has them in his pocket. He loves the Twittersphere because he controls the message. Our very First Amendment is in peril people, because a despot has won the keys to our kingdom. Celebrity apprentices will rule with abandon. 

It’s not funny. It’s not Entertainment News anymore. Reality TV and the real media are merging into a dystopian future we should have seen coming. 

I asked Zoltar if it’s time to sew my gold jewelry into the hem of my jacket. He said, “Yes.”