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The merry men of GLoP are back with their first show of 2022, and they have a lot to get off their chests, starting with the fact that all three of them are now certified COVID Heroes®. Also, some thoughts about Big Government and snow removal, theater troupes in TV, movies, and plays, Licorice Pizza (that’s a movie, not a new snack food, and why Apple TV+’s new production of The Tragedy of Macbeth is like a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon.
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This should be good. Is the road to hell I-95? Do the thoughts revolve around Governor Youngkin not doing his job, even though he isn’t in the seat yet?
I sure hope no one criticizes Gov. Ralph Northam. That would be mean.
My God, the level of criticism coming from these guys is unbelievable! Rob goes after Shakespeare for using the convention of a theater troupe in Hamlet (Rob seems to miss the point of the convention), along with David Milch, writer of Deadwood. Then Pippin, Godspell and anything that has some amateur theater troupe involved in the story (yes, even Hamlet) is deemed insufferable. It’s difficult to pull off and can be done badly, but really? It sounds to me that Rob hates actors and thinks that makes him a full-blooded conservative. Actors are easy to make fun of, we know, but as a class, they don’t deserve this level of contempt. It’s actually very difficult to do well, or even half-well.
I mean, Rob wrote jokes for a postman and a dumb bartender for a living! Cheers was a good sitcom. The sitcom evolved from Commedia Dell’ Arte years of traveling theater troupes using stock characters before television and Hollywood existed. A case can be made that Cheers is just rehashed Commedia, as old as the 16th century.
Jon and Jonah, to my knowledge, are just critics and haven’t produced anything creative other than their own caricatures and delusions about Donald Trump supporters. Yeah, there’s bad stuff out there, but the esoteria of ever-so-subtle sophisticated critique could use a little more humility for my taste.
The thing they do produce, this podcast for example, isn’t especially compelling either.
In the beginning we are told for the ten thousandth time how liberals are stupid for thinking government solutions are the answer, after doing nothing whatsoever but supporting the GOP establishment that keeps the whole thing greased and operational.
They hold the naive view, apparently, that elected representatives are posturing solely for their careers in politics and aren’t playing the much more lucrative game of angling for lobbying jobs, pundit jobs on cable TV and board member jobs as payback for services rendered after being defeated (if they ever are) bat the polls.
No one said a word about Jonah’s mis-tweet. He’s a political pundit for a living, he lives in the DC area, maybe even in Virginia, and he doesn’t know who the governor is. My objection to this class of right-of-center pundit is they rely heavily on the MSM narrative and they don’t even know it. They travel in certain circles and get their info from their associates, and can’t seem to access or relate to the views of ordinary people, which is a very negative indicator of the quality of their advice.
Like a lot of a certain kind of conservative intellectuals, the guys understand about liberal control of media and social media in one part of their brains, but then in another part of their brains they talk about politics as if those liberal media don’t exist or have no influence.
In other words, it doesn’t matter how objectively bad is the performance of the Democratic Party — if their voters never hear about it.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with various people, and got in a political argument with a progressive couple sitting across from me. (I had a good time but I suspect they didn’t.) At one point I mentioned the disaster in Afghanistan. What disaster in Afghanistan, they wanted to know, honestly puzzled.
I got the opportunity to explain to them about 16 million women being degraded, and tens of thousands of our allies being hunted down and killed — or, to stay alive, joining ISIS.
But the point is, the media they believe in told them none of this. Depending on which story is useful to the cause at a particular moment, Afghanistan is old news, or a Biden triumph, or all Trump’s fault.
I so agree about the theater troupe stuff. I started watching Station 11 but got so fed up with the stuff set 20 years into the future. The parts dealing with the onset of the plague were interesting, but watching a bunch of fools running around in dystopia and spouting Shakespeare was ridiculous. I kept thinking what are they eating? How do they survive the winters? I so don’t care about any of these characters.
Beat me to the post. All of it.
What was again frequently cited in the discussion were network shows – meaning they’re watching them, but almost no one is anymore, including the horrors of Fox (Fox just being another example of the MSM, despite its deserved conservative caricature).
Talking about the dynamics of the elections in the last 20 years or so, with parties switching majorities frequently, bemoaning the olden times, well, OK. I think they’re missing what most of us have realized, is that there’s very little daylight between the parties, generally (the wedge issues notwithstanding). Meaning they’re all voting for bigger budgets and expansion of gov’t, despite the protestations on the right around that, you’ll notice that no matter the bills passed nor the posturing the annual budget increases never stop, outpace inflation, and seemingly the incompetence levels of gov’t get exponentially larger.
No discussion around that. Actually doing the conservative thing and shrinking the scope and impact on the gov’ts
slavesstakeholders. Not on the table.For a podcast about culture, presumably all kinds (but primarily pop), it’s veering into Grump Oldmen Gripe About Culture, which is not to say it’s not funny (it still is, else I’d stop listening, which I did about halfway through). It’s probably fair to say I enjoy some amount of griping, and criticism, but for the Station 11 example (the absurdities of the premises are part of the story) means you might miss a pretty good show, especially in a market swamped with unwatchable stuff, so sifting out the minor jewels is a small joy.
Unless we’re going to talk Venom 2. Then I’m all ears.
Great villian.
The “both parties are equally bad” argument doesn’t hold up (he said tactfully).
Just a few items off the top of my head: the Republicans are the party that doesn’t want to pack the Supreme Court, that doesn’t want to end the filibuster, that opposes social media censorship (instead of demanding more censorship), that wants to make voter fraud harder (instead of easier).
The Republicans are opposed to making the U.S. even more of a racial caste system than it already is; for example, opposing slavery “reparations”.
Admittedly, the kind of compromises that legislating and governing necessarily entail will tend to disillusion the purists and the naïve.
A friend sent me this:
I loved JPod going on about the Dems 3rd rail obession.
They are clamping down on the 3rd rail as if to say “how much electricity can even exist, really?”.
Hilarious.
There’s no such place as Afghanistan. Except on “The U.S. of Al”God bless it.
Time and time again I read criticism regarding the “type of conservative” Jonah, Rob and Pod are.
I realize that the US is very different in many regards from my tiny country of Portugal. We are just 10 million crammed in a rectangle of 89000 km2 (continental Portugal), that’s 33.585 square miles in your barbaric measurement units. The maximum width of the country is about 150 miles and yet, surprise surprise! We have also have our “flyover country”. It’s probably absurd for an American that people living 60 miles from the coast are considered “country folk”.
I have a farmer friend and he’s a conservative like me. And although I was raised on a farm and my friend has a “big city past” (he studied in the capital city and even got a Ph D in geology) we are different types of conservatives. I’m a bit more like the “certain type of conservative” so disdained and my friend resembles a more grassroots conservative from inland America. And in a way, it’s how it should be. I can’t be a wide-open spaces guy in an urban setting of 3-4 million. I have another friend that is from the north of the country and I always lived in the South of the country. The Northerners in Portugal are more entrepreneurial, more “pull yourself by your bootstraps” kind of people. I live in Lisbon that is a bit like a mixture of Washington DC with New York. The big state is here, the central state is here, all the “elites” are here, But he just elected a conservative mayor!
I have had big discussions with my Northern friend regarding the only openly conservative newspaper we have in Portugal. And the conversation is similar to the kind of back and forward I read here sometimes. There isn’t a publication that fits 100% with our worldview. We conservatives are a diverse crew with different points of view. And that’s the way it should be.
I’m not saying they’re the same in every way – that should be obvious. What I mean is the size and scope of gov’t gets larger, and they vote for it in budgets, every year. In that way, they are equally bad, and they both own the product of their work.
Want to give me a similar list of ways in which Republicans have shrunk the overall budget? He asked tactfully?
Thanks for sharing. Of course there are different types of conservatives, but here in the US there is a split happening whereby just being “conservative” doesn’t mean much anymore since there are, well, different types who have vastly different priorities. When a ‘conservative’ continually bashes the one guy who actually got elected and actually did great things for the conservative cause, we aren’t exactly on the same team anymore, nor should we be.
Perhaps we will vote for the same person but we differ on priorities and strategies for ultimate success. When it appears that one faction is ruining or sabotaging the success of another faction – either by not getting elected as a result of being alienated from the Republican- leaning base, or by pretending to advocate for what the base wants and then either not doing anything, or eventually openly defying them (see McCain, John) that’s a real problem.
I wish I was in Portugal again, by the way. Nice country!
Even if you judge parties only by the single dimension of budgets, absurdly ignoring everything else, the Republicans and Democrats are still not “equally bad”: growth vs. explosive growth.
Ronald Reagan understood cutting the Federal budget was politically impossible. Period. His most optimistic goal was to grow the economy faster than the government, reducing its share.
Regarding the I-95 freeze up, Jonah was compelled to “bring it down to Earth.” I believe the situation is much more serious than he imagines. Having to take a crap in desperate conditions can make us extremely vulnerable and something in our caveman genes knows that. It reminds me of the legendary tale of the man on the Micronesian island of Palau who while walking home late at night was moved to take a crap off a bridge over the local tidewaters. While he squatted over the water from the bridge, a salt water crocodile took the opportunity to bite his naked bum and tried to pull him into the water. Legend has it he survived to tell the tale and had the scars to prove it happened.
That was in the tropics. An example of the vulnerability of relieving oneself in harsh winter conditions is related in the memoir of a Prussian soldier who experienced Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow. The desperation felt by thousands of soldiers struggling to survive proved once again what every soldier knows: one needs some mates who can be relied upon for mutual self protection. The author, whose name I cannot recall, tells how a soldier who went into a frozen field to relieve himself might be toppled over when his trousers were dropped, robbed of some of his clothes, and left to freeze.
As for the thousands of vehicles and their occupants stuck in the columns on the highway for many hours, it reminds me of shipwreck survivors in their various lifeboats waiting for an unsure outcome.
Idea: a short story or script along the lines of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) except that instead of being shipwrecked survivors confined to a small boat, they are DC commuters trapped in a van on a frozen highway. In the movie, one of the survivors is the German submarine commander who sunk the boat’s mother ship. His part could be written as a Virginia Senator who is an I-95 “slug” commuter. Or heck, make it the Secretary of Transportation. As in the movie, relations will be tense, concepts of morality and equity will be explored, and some of the commuters, if not all, will not survive. Or it could simply be a comedy with lots of fart jokes and ‘Gotta No. 2` scenes.
Reminds of a scene from “The Pacific” (also recounted in Sledge’s With the Old Breed, IIRC) where a US soldier on a pacific island goes into a cave to relieve himself, comes running out with his pants around his ankles being chased by a Japanese soldier, screaming “shoot him, shoot him!”
I did not think this discussion would end up here.