The Heroes & Icons channel posted (with your blogger adding):
The 1970s served up some super fantastical television series — Battlestar Galactica, The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels, etc. But, like the cinema of the era, a lot of TV was rooted in reality.
More shows than you realize were based on a true story, ripped from headlines, and inspired by real people. Let’s dive in.
BLACK SHEEP SQUADRON
This World War II aerial adventure gave the Hollywood treatment to the missions of Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. Seen here with the actor who portrayed him, Robert Conrad, Pappy flew for the Marines in the South Pacific. His squadron of “misfits and screwballs” — as the opening credits declared them — came off as more invincible and mythological on the small screen.
BARETTA
The network thought Tony Musante was bluffing. The actor said he only wanted to do one season of his gritty cop series, Toma. Producers figured it was a negotiating tactic. It was not. Musante bailed and the show recast and retooled into the more traditional action hour Baretta. The original Toma had more of a Serpico vibe, based on the career of a real New Jersey detective, Dave Toma, who made cameos throughout the series. Toma splashed violence across the screen and dealt with heavy urban issues. Baretta sanded off the rough edges, renaming the character Tony Baretta and making him a master of disguise with a pet cockatoo.
EMERGENCY!
The made-for-TV movie that served as the pilot for this drama went under the unwieldy title The Wedsworth-Townsend Act. Wisely, creator Jack Webb shortened it to the punchy Emergency! — complete with an exclamation point. In 1970, California Governor Ronald Reagan signed The Wedsworth-Townsend Paramedic Act, establishing the first accredited paramedic training program in America. Emergency! popularized and promoted the very concept of EMS — still a novel concept in 1972. Just as he did with police files on Dragnet, Webb asked writers to mine fire stations’ logbooks for true incidents to dramatize on television.
KOJAK
Like Emergency!, Kojak premiered under a clunky title — The Marcus-Nelson Murders. The TV movie was based on the grisly Wylie-Hoffert murders, a.k.a. the Career Girls Murders, the case that lead to the establishment of Miranda Rights in the Supreme Court. Telly Savalas’s character, Theo Kojak, was a mishmash of real detectives who worked the Wylie-Hoffert murder case. …
M*A*S*H
Obviously, the Korean War happened. No secret there. And you know M*A*S*H was first an acclaimed movie, directed by Robert Altman. The dramedy franchise was based on the autobiographical novel of H. Richard Hornberger, who wrote under the alias Richard Hooker. Hornberger served in Korea with the 8055 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. He even called his tent “The Swamp.” Oh, and like Hawkeye, he went to Maine after the war.
PROJECT U.F.O.
Believe it or not, the UFO show was based on reality. Another creation of Jack Webb (see Emergency! above), Project U.F.O. again utilized the producer’s penchant for “ripped from the case files” tales, in this instance the United States Air Force study of unidentified flying objects labeled “Project Blue Book.” As in reality, many of the investigations ended up having mundane explanations — but some were left ambiguously in the realm of the eerie.
THE WALTONS
Creator Earl Hamner Jr. transformed his youth in Schuyler in Nelson County, Virginia, into the loves and lives of the Walton clan on Walton’s Mountain. Hamner documented his upbringing in the books Spencer’s Mountain (1961) and The Homecoming: A Novel About Spencer’s Mountain (1970), stories that were first adapted into a film with Henry Fonda, Spencer’s Mountain (1963).
WELCOME BACK, KOTTER
Barbarino, Freddie, Epstein, and Horshack existed in real life. They were classmates of Gabe Kaplan at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, the same school shown in the opening credits of his sitcom, Welcome Back, Kotter. Kaplan turned his school days into a comedy routine (and eventual album) he called “Holes and Mellow Rolls.” Kaplan was a remedial student himself, which is how he met kids like Ray Barbarino, Freddie “Furdy” Peyton, and Epstein “The Animal.” The names were slightly changed for TV. Oh, and the insult, “Up your hole with a Mello roll!” was softened to the catchphrase “Up your nose with a rubber hose!”
WKRP IN CINCINNATI
Sitcom creator Hugh Wilson based most WKRP employees on real radio pros. Andy Travis was based on Mikel “Captain Mikey” Herrington, a pioneer of the album-rock radio format at San Jose’s KOME and Los Angeles’ KMET. (He was also the voice of Sears.) Atlanta disc jockey “Skinny” Bobby Harper inspired Dr. Johnny Fever (as did Howard Hesseman’s real-life experience as a DJ). Harper worked at WQXI with Bill Dial, a writer for WKRP in Cincinnati. The station owners, the Carlsons, were based on WQXI’s manager Jerry Blum.
On Sunday, NBC’s Meet the Press, which has been interviewing notable politicians for the past 75 years, brought in for questioning the runaway favorite for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination: Donald Trump.
Media critics were—predictably by now—livid. Not just at new MTP host Kristin Welker’s inability to corral Washington’s most slippery fish, but at the very notion that a politician-interviewing show should even interview this particular politician, after all that he has done.
“It’s arguable that, at this juncture, there is really no need to interview Trump,” posited CNN media writer Oliver Darcy. “Just a colossal mistake to showcase this sociopath,” tweeted American Enterprise Institute emeritus scholar and Atlantic contributing editor Norman Ornstein. “Downright dangerous journalism to legitimize this guy—in the name of having a ‘talked about’ premiere,” charged former New York Times media reporter Bill Carter. “Is it possible,” an exasperated former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob wondered, “that journalists who platform lying fascists don’t know they’re undermining democracy?”
It may seem counterintuitive that protecting democracy requires refusing to talk with a primary-frontrunning former president who more than 74 million Americans voted for in 2020. But not if you think that Trump is uniquely awful and dangerous, that his fact-tethered interlocutors are helpless against his firehose of lies, and that there are no meaningfully compensatory benefits to be gleaned from the traditional journalistic practice of interrogating a candidate for high office.
“Interviewing Trump does not work,” declared NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. “No accountability moment ever comes.” Welker’s effort “proved once again that interviewing the 45th president is an impossible task,” averredVanity Fair‘s Molly Jong-Fast. The Bulwark‘s Jonathan Last made the bold comportmental assertion that the “media’s job—and particularly broadcast media—is to think deeply about how to avoid helping Trump with its coverage….It would be nice if the folks in broadcast media could lend us—and democracy—a hand. Or, at the very least, stop giving aid and comfort to the authoritarian just because you want to pull a ratings number.”
Such sentiments were rarely heard in the mainstream media 25 years ago. Back then one might sporadically encounter a Committee of Concerned Journalists member clucking about the need to hold firm on traditional, nonpartisan journalistic values of verification, particularly in the face of such debasing new ideologically tainted Web phenomena as The Drudge Report. It was mostly on the political margins—theNation left, the Free Republic right—where you’d find critics chipping away at the unconscious or unacknowledged biases in the aspirationally neutral and still-potent MSM. Progressives would complain that the right had learned to successfully “work the refs“; conservatives would charge that newsrooms nursed a secret agenda to tip elections toward Democrats.
Now the agenda is no longer secret, and the ref-working is coming from inside the house.
“Be truthful, not neutral,” is the catchphrase longtime CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour has been drawing industry-wide praise for this season, including back in May when she deployed it to criticize her own network for holding a live town hall interview with the former and would-be future president.
“We know Trump and his tendencies. Everyone does. He just seizes the stage and dominates. No matter how much flack the moderator tries to aim at the incoming, it doesn’t often work,” Amanpour told an audience of Columbia Journalism School grads, adding: “Maybe we should revert back to the newspaper editors and TV chiefs of the 1950s, who in the end refused to allow McCarthyism onto their pages, unless his foul lies, his witch hunts, and his rants reached the basic evidence level required in a court of law.”
This is a wild, if instructive, misreading of history. It wasn’t journalistic non-platforming that trimmed back the Red Scare excesses of Sen. Joe McCarthy; it was something closer to the opposite. Live gavel-to-gavel television broadcasts of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, evidence-free “rants” and all, gave Americans a visceral view of an increasingly deranged populist steamrolling individual due process. His reputation never recovered.
When CBS titan Edward R. Murrow famously denounced Tailgunner Joe just prior to those hearings, he did so mostly by using McCarthy’s own previously broadcast words (edited for maximally villainous effect, to be sure). Then he invited the senator back for a follow-up show to respond.
The contemporary journalistic fad of trying to deplatform problematic political figures—whether it’s Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) from The New York Times, Trump-whisperer Steve Bannon from a New Yorker festival, 2020 “election deniers” from CNN, conservative writer Kevin Williamson from The Atlantic, and so on—is based on a mixture of elitism and defeatism. Elitism in the sense that these outlets are treated as elevated, nearly sacrosanct spaces—platforms!—to be guarded zealously against conservative contamination, and also that the type of political media consumers who stubbornly continue to support Trump are impervious to fact-based persuasion and therefore better written off.
“The public is well familiar with Trump and already knows that he is a man estranged with the truth,” Oliver Darcy argued. “As Trump once infamously bragged, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still maintain support from his loyal base of fans. Trump’s supporters are choosing to stand behind him because of his blustering personality and style. They lock arms with him because they believe he is boldly standing up for them and taking the fight to the elites. Not because of his position on Taiwan.” (Emphases in original.)
This is where the defeatism comes in. Since Trump voters are unreachable, and since Trump himself is basically undefeated in one-on-one interviews, why bother? Particularly if (in the recent words of Guardian media critic Margaret Sullivan) “his re-election would bring extreme anti-democratic results.”
Accepting for the moment the provocative premise that preventing Trump’s re-election is a core journalistic value, refusing to interview the guy is like taking away the rope with which he is always ready to hang himself. Given that he is unlikely to testify at his four upcoming criminal trials, interviews are a critical venue for hearing Trump’s legally germane rationalizations for engaging in facially illegal conduct.
At the industry-derided CNN town hall, for example, Trump claimed that “I had the absolute right to do whatever I want with” the presidential records that he retained after leaving office, in statutory violation of the Presidential Records Act. And during a recent sit-down with Megyn Kelly, when presented with the fact that he had no right to defy a subpoena for those documents, Trump dissembled that “I just don’t know the timing.” As Jacob Sullum pointed out, “Trump is suggesting he did not have to comply with a subpoena he claimed to be obeying. This does not seem like a winning legal strategy.”
So there are potential benefits to interviewing Trump when viewed through the narrow lens of impacting his ability to regain the White House. But even as someone who wrote an essay under the headline “The Case Against Trump: Donald Trump Is an Enemy of Freedom,” I would suggest that subjecting political journalism to the instrumental test of how it impacts electoral outcomes will likely be effective neither politically nor journalistically.
Voters and news consumers are smart enough to know they are being sneered at and will discount content from the sneerers accordingly. They may also have a better-trained nose for the media’s ideological blind spots, such as when The Daily Beast‘s Corbin Bolies this week suggested that President Joe Biden—yes, this Joe Biden—”would have been a better interview subject for her first episode as Meet the Pressmoderator, as they at least would have been able to start from the same set of facts.”
The “pro-democracy” beat thus far does not have a great track record of truthiness. Eleven months ago, the “truthful, not neutral” crowd was warning us, despite a glaring paucity of evidence, that a GOP win in the midterms would result in the deliberate tanking of the international economy so that Republicans could force through cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Margaret Sullivan’s 2022 memoir/manifesto was inaccurately maligning Republicans by the second paragraph. Applied “moral clarity” seems more about policing adjectives in news organizations’ tweets and headlines, and yelling “false equivalence!” every time someone mentions that Biden’s aging is a political problem.
Interviewing Donald Trump is a difficult assignment, no doubt. And some of us who are opposed to journalistic deplatforming otherwise share in some of the deplatformers’ unhappiness with Trump’s influence on the Republican Party and the American body politic. But both journalism and basic civic participation require a certain perseverance, and perhaps a certain faith that the effort can and will be worth it in the end. Are you a political journalist who does not like Donald Trump? Maybe do some convincing and truthful journalism capable of reaching people who don’t share your political priors. Trying to rope off a former U.S. president from the institution of media will likely make the institution weaker, and the politician stronger.
Readers know I consider myself a child of the ’80s, since I graduated from high school and college and started working in that decade. (Which makes me an old member of Generation X.)
But while the ’80s is probably superior to other decades in entertainment, particularly in music, that is not the case with motor vehicles. (I also got my driver’s license in the ’80s.)
Chances are that if you were in middle school or high school during the ’70s you had posters of either exotic cars, babes like Farrah Fawcett, or your favorite rock bands on the walls of your bedroom, if your mother permitted them. About the former, Motor Trend writes:
After the Lamborghini Miura made a splash in the 1960s and later became regarded as the first production “supercar” to capture the modern imagination, the following decade exploded with exotic machinery the world over intent on capturing some of the Miura’s magic. These ’70s supercars rose above the expectations of a standard sports car by way of their sultry looks, incredible performance for the era, and in some cases their sheer audacity—carving out an unforgettable chapter in the history of the automobile.
In no particular order, here’s a look at 10 of the most memorable supercars from the 1970s, exotics hailing from the likes of Germany, Japan, the U.K., and of course, Italy.
A coalition of 22 donors today announced Press Forward, a national initiative to strengthen communities and democracy by supporting local news and information with an infusion of more than a half-billion dollars over the next five years. Press Forward will enhance local journalism at an unprecedented level to re-center local news as a force for community cohesion; support new models and solutions that are ready to scale; and close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice.
Since 2005, approximately 2,200 local newspapers have closed, resulting in 20 percent of Americans living in “news deserts” with little to no reliable coverage of important local events. Press Forward seeks to reverse the dramatic decline in local news that has coincided with an increasingly divided America and weakening trust in institutions.
“We have a moment to support the reimagination, revitalization, and rapid development of local news.”
National, regional, local, and issue-specific partners co-designed Press Forward with the aim of deploying significant new resources to the field through greater coordination and peer learning. Informed by insights and feedback from leaders and practitioners in the field, this multi-funder collaborative aligned on a set of shared values to guide their grantmaking: prioritizing transformation, centering community needs, growing with equity, ensuring accessibility, and preserving the editorial independence of news gathering organizations.
Initial Press Forward partners are The Archewell Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln, Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, Mary W. Graham, Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media Group, Heising-Simons Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Joyce Foundation, KFF, Knight Foundation, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Lumina Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Outrider Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
“We have a moment to support the reimagination, revitalization, and rapid development of local news. We are prepared to support the strongest ideas and seed new ones; build powerful networks; and invest in people, organizations, and networks with substantial resources,” said John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation. “The philanthropic sector recognizes the need to strengthen American democracy and is beginning to see that progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts.”
While philanthropic support for journalism has grown over the past decade, overall giving to local news falls short of what is needed. Press Forward funders are ready to move from individual grantmaking strategies to a shared vision and coordinated action that ensures individuals are informed and engaged on issues that affect their everyday lives.
Press Forward partners have identified the following priorities and have committed to making grants in one or more of these four areas of focus:
STRENGTHEN LOCAL NEWSROOMS THAT HAVE TRUST IN LOCAL COMMUNITIES
There is a growing movement of community-focused journalism across the nation that is shifting how the critical stories of our time are being told. We need to make bold investments in local news organizations and the networks that support and grow them.
ACCELERATE THE ENABLING ENVIRONMENT FOR NEWS PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION
We need to scale the infrastructure required to support a thriving independent local news sector, expanding shared services and tools—from legal support to membership programs.
CLOSE LONGSTANDING INEQUALITIES IN JOURNALISM COVERAGE AND PRACTICE
We must move resources to newsrooms and organizations that are improving diversity of experience and thought along with the availability of accurate and responsive news and information in historically underserved communities and economically challenged news deserts.
ADVANCE PUBLIC POLICIES THAT EXPAND ACCESS TO LOCAL NEWS AND CIVIC INFORMATION
We need new frameworks and robust coalitions to advance policy ideas that expand access to news and information while strengthening the First Amendment and protecting the editorial independence of local journalists. Investments in nonpartisan public policy development, analysis, and advocacy are needed at the local, state, and national levels.
Press Forward is independent of ideology and plans to work with More Perfect, a bipartisan initiative that is advancing five interrelated democracy goals, one of which is Access to Trusted News and Information.
A coalition of 22 groups, including prominent left-wing organizations, have pledged more than $500 million to fund local media publications over the course of five years, according to an announcement posted on Thursday.
The new coalition is called “Press Forward,” and many of the groups in it appear to have a left-wing bias based on their funding and initiatives, although the group states it “is independent of ideology.” The coalition plans to reverse the downward trajectory of local news outlets and “close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice,” according to the announcement of its formation.
Since 2005, about 2,500 newspapers have ceased operations, according to The New York Times. This number is rising and many that are still in business have been forced to reduce staff.
Press Forward will allocate the $500 million to fund grants to support local newsrooms, provide resources to diverse publications and assist in developing collaborative tools such as legal support and membership programs, according to the announcement.
The MacArthur Foundation is leading the coalition and has pledged $150 million in grants, according to the NYT. It has frequently contributed to left-wing organizations such as Planned Parenthood, Tides Foundation and Environmental Defense Fund, according to its grants database, giving more than $5 million to each, according to InfluenceWatch.
Knight Foundation is also donating $150 million and has previously given over $1.2 million to nine universities and nonprofits to “combat disinformation in communities of color” in 2022, according to its website.
The other 20 groups are contributing the remainder of the over $500 million, one of which is Democracy Fund, an organization run by left-wing billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Democracy Fund provided a $130,000 grant to Center for Internet Security to fund a “portal” that was used to flag and censor social media content containing “misinformation” during the 2020 election, according to tax records obtained by independent journalist Lee Fang.
Furthermore, the Ford Foundation is a member of the coalition, an organization that helped launch the Black Feminist Fund in 2021 with $15 million in seed funding, according to its website.
Another member of the coalition is Archewell Foundation, which is run by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
“Press Forward seeks to reverse the dramatic decline in local news that has coincided with an increasingly divided America and weakening trust in institutions,” according to the announcement.
Moreover, the groups in the coalition “aligned on a set of shared values to guide their grantmaking: prioritizing transformation, centering community needs, growing with equity, ensuring accessibility, and preserving the editorial independence of news gathering organizations,” according to the announcement.
“The MacArthur Foundation has been funding public service journalism for several decades with a core belief that no-strings-attached, general operating support to news outlets best preserves editorial independence, serves democracy, and gives news outlets the freedom required to cover the news and serve their audiences as they see fit,” a spokesperson for the MacArthur Foundation told the DCNF. “The funding we provide comes without expectations or requirements on coverage priorities, and always will.”
“Knight Foundation believes that in order to deliver on its promise to American democracy, news organizations must be independent, and journalists must be free to report about issues without influence from others,” Knight Foundation Director of Communications Rebecca Dinar told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation and Archewell Foundation did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Does giving money to left-wing organizations make the donor left-wing?
The story has few comments, two of which are:
It’s anti-democracy and anti-American to bribe or politically influence the free press.
They should save their money. The media is already in the bag for the Leftist Democrat Party.
There are two pieces of legislation in Congress to supposedly help the media — one to force social media companies to compensate newspapers for links to their stories, and one to provide payroll tax credits to cover journalists’ payroll taxes. Once upon a time newspapers and broadcasting companies could not receive government aid for what were obvious First Amendment reasons. But media companies got the same PPP loans that non-media companies got. What are the implications of media outlets getting government money?
Tina Descovich found herself surrounded by “Muslim dads.” The scene was a school-board meeting late last year in Dearborn, Mich. Local parents were angry about sex-themed books at the school library, which they regarded as “pornography.”
After chatting with Ms. Descovich for a few minutes, a Dearborn dad realized she was a founder of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit parents’ rights group that came into being on Jan. 1, 2021. He shook his head and told her she didn’t “seem like a racist at all.”
“That’s because I’m not,” she replied.
With its dogged focus on school reform, hostility to teachers unions and opposition to Covid shutdowns and mandates, the group is hated on the left and typecast as far-right—or worse—by much of the media. I speak with Ms. Descovich, a 49-year-old mother of five, at Moms for Liberty’s headquarters here, between Miami and Jacksonville. Seated with her is Tiffany Justice, 44, the group’s co-founder and a mother of four. The modest office has no external signage to identify its occupants. Both women have received such a deluge of threats—by email, voicemail and even handwritten letters—that there’s a deputy at the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office whose main job is to review each one. “Someone calling himself Satan writes to me every week,” Ms. Descovich says wryly. “He lives in Denver.”
A more influential antagonist is the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, founded in 1971, has a storied history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan via civil lawsuits and cooperation with law enforcement. The media uncritically describe it as a civil-rights group, even though in recent decades its has shifted its focus to smearing conservative organizations as hate groups.
In June it labeled Moms for Liberty as “extremist” and “antigovernment.” It stated in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” that the organization’s “primary goals” are to “fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place” for students who are “Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.”
Ms. Justice says that is a lie, and accuses the SPLC of having “put a target on the back of every American parent, every American mom.” She says the designation is “meant to be used as a weapon against us” and asks: “Are any government agencies using the designation as a way for them to do more surveillance on us, or to somehow try to curtail our actions as an organization?”
Moms for Liberty may sue. Ms. Justice says the group is “exploring every legal option” and has “retained the best plaintiff-side defamation firm in the United States to hold the SPLC accountable for their hateful targeting of our members.” U.S. law makes it difficult for plaintiffs to win defamation lawsuits, and judges have dismissed other cases against the SPLC. But in 2018 the group paid Maajid Nawaz more than $3 million to settle his claim that it defamed him by labeling him an “anti-Muslim extremist.”
The SPLC’s smear appears to have done damage. Moms for Liberty had planned an event last month at Milwaukee’s Italian Community Center. “After an inquiry from the Journal Sentinel,” wrote Rory Linnane, a reporter for that paper, “Bartolotta Restaurants, which books events for the center, said it would not be hosting any Moms for Liberty event.” The first words in Ms. Linnane’s article were “Moms for Liberty, a group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an extremist antigovernment organization . . .”
In Davis, Calif., a librarian shut down a Moms for Liberty meeting on grounds that a speaker who objected to male athletes competing against women and girls violated a rule against “misgendering.” Again, local news coverage prominently cited the SPLC’s designation.
The mission of Moms for Liberty, Ms. Descovich says, is to “unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” She came up with the group’s name, while Ms. Justice wrote its catchiest slogan: “We do not co-parent with the government.”
They met in 2019, three years after each was elected to her local school board—Ms. Descovich here, in Brevard County, Ms. Justice immediately south, in Indian River County. Ms. Descovich had been a Republican, Ms. Justice a politically unaffiliated “floater,” but both were impelled by personal experience to get involved with school politics.
Ms. Descovich’s eureka moment came in 2014 when her son was in seventh grade. “I started seeing assignments coming home that were concerning,” she says. “He brought home an assignment that I have to this day. He got 100-plus on it, and the teacher had said, ‘Great job!’ When he handed it to me, he said, ‘I got an A.’ . . . It was a ‘wanted’ poster for Christopher Columbus, for ‘crimes against humanity.’ ”
She was so shocked that she spent “months buying every book I could find on Christopher Columbus, reading everything I could, trying to figure out what had changed since I’d studied history.”
Ms. Justice says that for her, “it wasn’t so much curriculum as the physical condition of my kids’ school.” Hallways would flood; roofs leaked; tiles would dislodge and fall onto classroom floors and desks—and rodents infested the place. “We were in a PTA meeting, and a rat ran up a half-wall.”
The school’s principal wouldn’t raise the issue with higher-ups. “She said she didn’t want problems with the district,” Ms. Justice says. “But it was really more about the fact that she didn’t want anyone paying too much attention to her school. Because we had a literacy rate for African-American students that was in the low 20th percentile, and the school still got an A from the grading system in the state.”
Ms. Descovich adds that her son got the highest possible grade on his end-of-class exam in seventh grade even though he missed half the answers. At that, the two moms dissolve in laughter.
“School districts do two things well,” Ms. Justice says: “They protect themselves and they celebrate themselves. And they find ways to celebrate themselves so that they can protect themselves.” The statistics may be “devastating”—almost half of Florida fourth-graders can’t read at grade level—but no one pays a price, and plausible remedies are foreclosed. “Thanks to union contracts,” Ms. Descovich says, “if you want to give bonuses to your teachers who are willing to serve in your poorest schools, you can’t do it.”
Why is their group called Moms for Liberty rather than something less neuralgic for the left—say, Moms for Education? “Because it’s about parental rights,” Ms. Justice swiftly answers. The group’s focus is “more than schooling. You have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of your children.” That includes their medical care and “their moral and religious upbringing. And that’s a right that the government doesn’t give you and can’t take away.” Growing more impassioned, she says she’s “fighting for the survival of America, to protect the role of a mother, to protect the autonomy of a parent.”
Transgender ideology is a particular concern. The “first big attack” on parental rights, Ms. Descovich says, happened in 2019, “with the ‘procedural guides,’ which started appearing in districts all across Florida.” These guides excluded parents from all conversations about “pronouns, restrooms, locker rooms, overnight field trips.” Teachers got the green light “to lie to parents.” In 2022 the Florida Legislature turned the light red by enacting the Parents Bill of Rights.
When Covid hit, “this was a whole new thing,” Ms. Descovich says. “We see the districts taking more and more authority away from parents.” On March 13, 2020, the state ordered Florida schools to close for two weeks, and they remained so for the rest of the school year.
“We go to virtual,” Ms. Justice recounts. “There’s no accountability for teaching. There’s no accountability for learning. I don’t know how we graduated all these kids. It was Crazytown until Gov. DeSantis announced on June 6, 2020, that schools in Florida would reopen—period, end of story, full time.”
Yet the shutdown did end up bringing accountability. Watching their kids’ classes on Zoom, parents became far more aware of what their children were learning—“or not learning,” Ms. Justice says. Ms. Descovich heard “stories after stories of parents’ jaws dropping at the lessons being taught and streamed into their own homes. We like to say that when we served on school boards, we saw behind the education curtain. And then 2020 happened, and all of America saw behind the curtain.”
Moms for Liberty began as a Florida group, then “exploded,” in Ms. Justice’s telling. It has 300 county chapters in 46 states and “120,000 active on-the-ground moms.” There are now 275 Moms for Liberty-endorsed school-board members nationwide.
Expansion has its pitfalls, especially for a decentralized grass-roots group like Moms for Liberty. In June an Indiana chapter apologized for publishing in its newsletter a quote attributed to Adolf Hitler: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”
“First of all,” Ms. Justice says, removing her glasses and rolling her eyes emphatically, “we’re not pro-Hitler.” Ms. Descovich repeats the point “for the record,” before continuing: “We knew we were going to be growing by chapters and that the chapters were going to have autonomy. And that every now and then an average mom, who’s never been political, is going to step in it.”
It puzzles both women that parental rights excite fevered opposition. “Why do they hate us? That’s a good question,” Ms. Descovich says. Ms. Justice responds: “Because we’re upsetting the balance of power.”
Moms for Liberty takes on “human issues,” Ms. Descovich says, “not partisan ones. Children learning how to read in school, that’s a human issue. Parental rights—how is that partisan?” But if “the people in power, the educational establishment, can keep us divided against each other based on race or religion or gender, then we’re easily controlled, right?”
Explaining why this issue is so potent, Ms. Descovich says, “Once a parent loses the right to direct the upbringing of their child, we’ve lost everything. You’ve lost your family. You’ve lost your community. You have lost the basic unit of society.” Ms. Justice adds: “The reading proficiency rates we have in America right now pose the greatest national-security threat of anything for the future of this country. If you have a nation of children and adults who cannot read, where does that leave America?” She promises that Moms for Liberty are “going to fight like hell.”
As Ms. Justice furrows her brow at the prospect of battle, Ms. Descovich leaps in to point out that Moms for Liberty call themselves “joyful warriors”: “Yes, we’re going to fight, but with a smile on our face. We’re going to fight like heck, of course—Tiffany says ‘hell,’ I say ‘heck’—but we’re going to do it with a smile on our face, because our children are watching us do this.”
The Journal Sentinel’s odd reliance on the SPLC and its insulting bias against Moms for Liberty went on and on from there. The original story by reporter Rory Linnane apparently no longer appears on the paper’s website. But you can read an updated version here.
A truly objective news story would have at least noted that much of America has another perspective of both the SPLC and Moms for Liberty. …
Varadarajan called out Linnane, the Journal Sentinel reporter who wrote the smear, by name, and that’s fine. But newspapers are not like blogs or Substack offerings. When I worked at the Journal Sentinel as a reporter and columnist many years ago, every piece was seen by multiple editors, none of whom were shy and most of whom were well-informed and tried hard to be objective. I never knew the political leanings of most of the people I worked with and they never knew mine until I applied for a columnist job.
If there’s still some sort of editing process over there, they have far worse problems than a biased reporter. It’s an institutional issue.
Or they’re just so short-handed the reporters are on their own. If that’s the case, they should just make unedited reporters into left-wing columnists — and label them as such.
And yet Gannett (owner of most daily newspapers in Wisconsin) is hiring a reporter to cover Taylor Swift. Really.
No singular Green Bay Packers villain emerged as the replacement for Aaron Rodgers on Sunday at Soldier Field.
New Packers quarterback Jordan Love made some big plays while throwing for 245 yards and three touchdowns in a 38-20 victory over the Chicago Bears. Running back Aaron Jones did plenty of damage, including 127 yards from scrimmage and two scores. And the Packers defense sacked Bears quarterback Justin Fields four times, forced a fumble and had a pick-six.
It always was easy to zero in on Rodgers’ dominance in the rivalry the last decade and a half as the major problem. But with Rodgers gone, the real bad guys in the Packers’ ninth straight win in the rivalry were the Bears and their not-good-enough showings virtually across the board.
“It was nothing (Love) did to surprise us,” safety Eddie Jackson said. “It was everything we did. Not to take anything from him, but today’s loss is on us, every man individually, especially myself giving up a touchdown (to Romeo Doubs). So we’ve just got to get better at it.”
Some fans offered their first boos of the season when the Bears went three-and-out on their first drive of the second half. But it got worse from there. Fields lost a fumble in the third quarter, and in the fourth quarter linebacker Quay Walker intercepted him and ran 37 yards for a touchdown for a 38-14 lead.
Fields finished 24 of 37 for 216 yards with one touchdown and the one pick and rushed nine times for a team-high 59 yards. New wide receiver DJ Moore had two catches for 25 yards.
“It definitely hurts, not only because it’s the first game of the season and it’s a loss, but it’s a loss to them,” Fields said. “Just want to say sorry to my teammates and all the fans that were rooting for us. We’ll bounce back and be good.”
Fields said the most frustrating part of the loss was the “self-inflicted penalties.” The Bears had seven penalties for 61 yards. That included four penalties on left tackle Braxton Jones: two false starts and two holding penalties.
“It’s hard to have success, hard to put yourself in good position to convert on third downs and score in the red zone if you’re hurting yourself, if you’re first-and-15, third-and-10,” Fields said. “And we were backed up for a good period of the game. So overall, we just have to straighten that out and if we do get in the gold zone, we have to score a touchdown.” …The Bears haven’t beaten the Packers since the 2018 season. They will get another chance in the final game of the regular season at Lambeau Field.“This game means a lot to me personally. I really wanted to win this one,” tight end Cole Kmet said. “I haven’t won one of these yet, and now you have to wait until (Game) 17 at the end here to get back at them.“It hurts, but it’s just one of 17. This league has a ton of parity in it, and we just have to be able to bounce back and move on from this.”
The harshest and most acutely accurate critique of how the Bears and quarterback Justin Fields played against the Packers in the season opener Sunday was that it was nothing new.
And everything was supposed to be new this season.
New offensive line.
New wide receivers.
New and improved version of Fields.
New mindset.
Where was any of that? It sure looked the same as it has for the last three decades or so as the Packers rolled them 38-20 at Soldier Field. It was a continuation of the droning misery the Bears endured throughout the Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers eras in Green Bay.
And these are hardly the Packers of Favre or Rodgers. They didn’t have to take on an obvious future Hall of Famer on Sunday. It was just Jordan Love, making the second start of his career. He wasn’t overwhelming, but he didn’t have to be. He just had to be better than Fields.
There’s a long list of complaints about this one, and Fields’ performance tops it.
Every NFL season begins with a sense of anticipation and hope for the 32 fan bases across the country.
Chiefs fans are hoping for a repeat championship. Eagles fans are hoping for redemption. Bengals and Bills fans hope their team can take the next step.
And Bears fans? Well, they are expecting to see at least some improvement off a tough 3-14 campaign. Some — like yours truly — even had the audacity to predict a playoff berth.
So it’s little wonder that the pregame atmosphere at Soldier Field was truly electric. Tailgaters were out in force, jammed in so tight that you could barely move through the sea of tables, grills and coolers.
Nearly every seat was filled for Jim Cornelison’s rousing rendition of the national anthem.
And when the Bears’ offense hit the field, there was plenty of belief that Justin Fields was about to carve up a suspect Packers’ defense.
Truly, it had to feel like Christmas morning to most of the 62,000-plus in attendance.
But in true green-and-gold Grinch fashion, the Packers’ stole the early momentum with an impressive fourth-down stop and rode off with an easy 38-20 victory that left the crowd wondering just “Who? Who? Who?” are these Bears?
This ranks as perhaps the worst opener in franchise history. If not, it’s neck-and-neck with the 49-7 throttling San Francisco handed the Bears in 2003, just two years after they went 13-3.
“This hurts,” said coach Matt Eberflus. “This is a division opponent. All the guys in there are sick to their stomachs — all the coaches, everybody.
“But we also know it’s the first game and we’ve got to get better.”
You don’t say.
It’s difficult to know where to begin, but it’s first fair to wonder if every healthy player should have seen more preseason action. Justin Fields threw just 9 passes, playing twice. RBs Khalil Herbert had 6 carries, D’Onta Foreman 8 and wideout DJ Moore caught just 2 passes.
Meanwhile, Packers QB Jordan Love threw 33 passes while playing in all three games.
So was that the difference?
Tight end Cole Kmet balked at this logic, pointing out that San Francisco barely played any starters in the preseason and trounced Pittsburgh 30-7 on Sunday.
“There’s no correlation between guys that get reps vs. don’t get reps,” Kmet said. “I get what you’re saying. I don’t know how much correlation it truly has to effectiveness when you go out there — and I just say that from a statistical standpoint.”
Regardless, the Bears were certainly outplayed and out-coached — especially in the second half when Green Bay’s lead ballooned from 10-6 to 24-6 in less than four minutes.
Where was the defense on that 51-yard throwback screen to Aaron Jones with 12 minutes left in the third quarter? Too many were following QB Jordan Love, who was rolling out.
How did Jones turn a short pass on fourth-and-3 into a 35-yard TD to make it 24-6? By turning new LB T.J. Edwards inside out with a sweet cut fake after he passed the line of scrimmage.
How did Packers WR Jayden Reed run a long-developing route on third-and-8 on the first play of the fourth quarter to pick up 11 yards? Because there was no pass rush.
And how — HOW? — did tight end Luke Musgrave end up so ridiculously wide open on the next play for a 37-yard gain?
We’ll let Eberflus explain that disaster.
“That was a fumbled snap and that was a hideout play,” Eberflus said. “So the tight end blocks, hides out and goes up the numbers. The (defenders kept) their eyes on the quarterback. We’ve got to stay back in coverage. We’ve got to do a better job there.”
Yes. Good call.
Where else can the Bears be better? Just about everywhere.
The 9 penalties for 90 yards were killers. Two were holding calls by second-year tackle Braxton Jones. Two others were back-to-back false starts — the second by THE ENTIRE OFFENSIVE LINE.
There was little, if any, pass rush by the D-line. Fields was 16-for-23 for a meager 148 yards before some garbage-time throws added 68 yards to his total.
Today in 1926, Radio Corporation of America — then owned by General Electric Co., Westinghouse, AT&T and United Fruit Co. (now known as Chiquita Brands International) — created the National Broadcasting Co. …
… which later returned to RCA’s parent, General Electric Co. (from whose name came the famous NBC chimes), and now is part of what used to be Universal Studios …
… and is part of Comcast cable TV …
In a possibly strange way, that makes every Universal-owned show on NBC “pure NBCUniversal,” or something.
… the movies, books, and toys that scared you when you were a kid. It’s also about kids in scary movies, both as heroes and villains. And everything else that’s traumatic to a tyke!
Through reviews, stories, artwork, and testimonials, we mean to remind you of all the things you once tried so hard to forget…
I’m not sure how I found this (as usual), but one of its posts is how …
Kids in this high-tech age don’t know how coddled they are when severe weather is forecast! Today, you’ve got all these electronic graphics with little maps in the corner, crawls across the screen, and now and then a weatherbabe (or weatherguy) may come on to give logical, reasoned updates.
Not so when I was a kid in the ’70s.
Even for a Severe Thunderstorm Watch, the programming would stop, the TV screen would fill with some ominous-looking graphic (still, of course, no movement back in those days) screaming whatever watch/warning it was in all caps, vivid colors…and worst of all, that infernal, screaming, shrill Emergency Broadcasting Service tone! Then usually an announcer with The Voice Of Doom would come on and provide the “public service” of warning us all of impending tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail that were SURELY going to target the house you lived in and make Dorothy’s tornado in THE WIZARD OF OZ about as scary as a silent fart.
Almost as bad were the “ALL CLEAR” statements that would come on-screen when the danger was supposedly past…except that the graphics were usually in more soothing shades of green and white.
The fake warnings created on YouTube are laughable compared to the horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the 1970s that made me want to scream running for the cellar – and, worse, my parents made me watch them because it was “educational“!
“Fake warnings,” you ask?
“Horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the ’70s,” you ask?
These relatively crude presentations occurred, of course, before color weather radar in the 1980s. (Previously weather radar was nothing more than World War II surplus air traffic radars.) For that matter, they all took place before TV stations routinely went to continuous weather coverage during tornado warnings, the first of which may have been …
He calls himself ‘Michael Alden,’ but says that this is not his name. He claims not to know his real name, nor who he is, nor anything that happened to him up until two months ago. Tonight we explore the mystery that is amnesia—the loss of a person’s memory, and with it, the loss of his humanity as well. I’m Walter Cronkite, and this is The 21st Century.”
Obviously, this never happened. As classic TV fans know, “Michael Alden” is the character played by Frank Converse in the cult classic series, Coronet Blue. And, as our ersatz Walter Cronkite says, Michael Alden has amnesia. He was dragged half dead out of the water, murmuring the words “Coronet Blue.” He has no idea what this means, nor about anything else that has happened to him up until the time he is rescued. He doesn’t even know his own name; he picks the name Michael Alden because it’s a combination of his doctor’s first name and the name of the hospital where he was treated. For the remaining thirteen episodes, Alden will search for clues as to his real identity, and what “Coronet Blue” really means—while the people who tried to kill him look to finish the job.
It’s a great idea for a television series, and had Coronet Blue existed in the real world (as is the case with many TV shows today), it’s quite likely that Alden would have been an ideal subject for a science program like The 21st Century (which aired on CBS from 1967-1970; it’s predecessor, The 20th Century, began in 1957). But just how plausible is the idea behind Coronet Blue? And how realistic is pop culture’s depiction of amnesia?
What do we know about Michael Alden? Not much. As Coronet Blue opens, he’s onboard a ship, one piece in a moving puzzle. It’s clear that he’s part of some kind of plot; a heist, perhaps, or some kind of undercover operation—we just don’t know. Quickly, it becomes apparent that something’s gone wrong, that his confederates have discovered something about him—he had ratted them out, he wasn’t who he claimed to be, something like that—and consequently he’s been targeted for death. There’s a struggle, he goes over the rail of the ship and into the water, the bad guys take a couple of shots at him (or are they good guys? We just don’t know), and after a time he’s dragged ashore, nearly dead, mumbling the words “coronet blue.” He recovers, physically. Mentally, however, he’s a mess. He doesn’t know who he is, how he got there, why someone would want to kill him, and he has no idea what “coronet blue” means. Michael Alden has amnesia.
In pop culture, the situation most like Alden’s is probably that of Jason Bourne, the character played by Matt Damon in the Bourne movies. Like Alden, Bourne is pulled out of the water after someone has tried to kill him; like Alden, he has no memory of his identity, although he retains his language and motor skills.
Both Alden and Bourne suffer from a type of psychogenic dissociative amnesia called “retrograde” amnesia. As opposed to “anterograde” amnesia, which affects the ability of the mind to form new memories, retrograde amnesia means the inability to recall things that happened before a specific date, usually the date of an accident or trauma. In both of these cases, we see how retrograde amnesia “tends to negatively affect episodic, autobiographical, and declarative memory while usually keeping procedural memory intact with no difficulty for learning new knowledge.
Now, within this fairly broad diagnosis, there are two subsets which we could be dealing with. The first, “situation-specific” amnesia, sometimes called “suppressed memory,” means that memory loss is confined to a specific traumatic event, with the victim able to remember things that happened both before and after the event. In the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare as a Child,” for example, Janice Rule plays Helen Foley, a woman who unknowingly suffers from such a condition: Helen has no memory of her mother’s murder, nor that the young Helen was a witness to the murder, until the appearance of a little girl (Helen when she was young; an apparition? A manifestation of her subconscious? It is the Twilight Zone, after all) brings her memory back in time to apprehend the murderer, who’s returned to eliminate the only witness—Helen.* That’s an example of “situation-specific” amnesia.
However, Alden’s amnesia appears more likely to be a type known as “global-transient”; in other words, a major gap in the part of the memory that relates to personal identity. The most common illustration of global-transient amnesia is a “fugue state,” in which there is “a sudden retrograde loss of autobiographical memory resulting in impairment of personal identity and usually accompanied by a period of wandering.” That last is significant, because the premise of Coronet Blue is built around Alden’s attempts to find out who he is, resulting in travelling—wandering—to different parts of the country, searching for anyone or anything that can help him discover who he is. And what coronet blue means, of course.
It’s likely that Alden’s doctors would have checked for some type of brain damage or other organic cause of his amnesia; they didn’t find anything, but even with today’s advancements in medical science, it’s unlikely that his amnesia was caused by anything as mundane as the proverbial “bump on the head.” Most of the time, psychogenic amnesia is traceable back to some type of psychological trigger; with Alden, it’s almost certainly related to the attack on him at the beginning of the first episode.
I wonder, though: does he really want to remember? Or is it fear—fear of what he doesn’t know—that keeps his memory from returning? All the time, though, he remains focused on “coronet blue,” and it’s not just because the theme keeps playing in the background. Find out the meaning, he knows, and it’s likely he’ll be able to unlock the mystery.
That fear of finding out what his past might be, though—that leads us to an obvious question: is Alden’s amnesia genuine? Is he a reliable narrator, or is he withholding something from the viewers?There are at least four episodes from the great legal drama Perry Mason that deal with amnesia. The first season episodes “The Case of the Crooked Candle,” and “The Case of the Desperate Daughter,” the fifth season episode “The Case of the Glamorous Ghost,” and the seventh season episode “The Case of the Nervous Neighbor” all involve Perry dealing with someone—generally a woman—claiming some form of amnesia.
Is there a significance in this gender distinction? Possibly. While there’s no particular evidence to suggest that women are more susceptible than men to amnesia, the victim in “Glamorous Ghost,” Eleanor Corbin, claims to be suffering from amnesia “after police find her running and screaming through woods near her apartment building.” Doubtless someone would have referred to Eleanor as being “hysterical.” And that term, as understood and applied to women, dates back over 4,000 years. The National Center for Biotechnology Information calls hysteria “the first mental disorder attributable to women, accurately described in the second millennium BC, and until Freud considered an exclusively female disease.”
Therefore, with Eleanor displaying no signs of physical injury, the suggestion is that her amnesia is a form of retrograde amnesia known as “hysterical reaction,” one that does not appear to depend upon an actual brain disorder. Perry accepts this diagnosis, at least insofar as it provides him with the opportunity to stall for time while he tries to assemble the facts. The police, however, are suspicious: and for good reason, as Encyclopaedia Britannicanotes darkly: “Although most dramatic, such cases are extremely rare and seldom wholly convincing.”
In fact, malingering—that is, the rational output of a neurological normal brain aiming at the surreptitious achievement of a well identified gain—is a constant threat in such cases. It’s understandable, then, that law enforcement officials have long been leery about such diagnoses, and for years they’ve pushed for some kind of standardized test for amnesia. Unlike the M’Naghten rule, which tests for criminal insanity, judging the legitimacy of amnesia claims defies application of uniform standards. As one expert remarks, amnesia cases “differ in onset, duration, and content forgotten” to the extent that it cannot be broadly defined in legal circumstances. And in a landmark case in England in 1959, a jury was called on to determine whether a defendant was faking amnesia, making him legally unfit to stand trial. The jury ruled he was faking (and convicted him, to boot). In truth, most cases of psychogenic retrograde autobiographical amnesia resolve themselves on their own accord, so if Hamilton Burger is willing to be patient, he might well be able to wait his suspect out. And, in fact, Eleanor Corbin is faking her amnesia, a deception which is soon uncovered by the police.* Could Michael Alden be doing the same thing?
The police were, it appears, suspicious of his claim; however, that suspicion was mitigated by the fact that he wasn’t accused of having committed any crime. Indeed, the only crime apparent seems to have been perpetrated against him. But if he is faking it, it’s reasonable to assume that the reason goes back to that mysterious scene at the beginning of the series. Which means that there’s something in his past he’s trying to hide, something very dark indeed. And he knows full well what it is.
Even a series as reliable as The Fugitive has an amnesia episode. It’s the ninth episode of the second season, “Escape into Black,” in which Dr. Richard Kimble is caught in an explosion at a diner. He awakens in a hospital, badly injured, and with no idea who he is or what has happened to him. Fortunately, there’s a social worker on the scene, one determined to look out for Kimble’s interests even though he can’t look out for them himself. Learning that Kimble had been asking about a one-armed man prior to the explosion, she renews the search herself. A good thing, too, because Kimble, having found out he’s wanted for murder and with no idea of whether or not he’s guilty, is on the verge of surrendering himself to Lt. Gerard.
We know how it ends, of course: Kimble regains his memory in time to escape Gerard and resume his search for the one-armed man. It’s mighty convenient for us all that his problem clears up before the episode ends—but how likely is it?
Well, it’s at least plausible. That same article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that retrograde amnesia cases “usually clear up with relative rapidity, with or without psychotherapy.” Once Michael Alden’s doctors make their diagnosis (which, although it’s not mentioned by name, is almost certainly psychogenic retrograde autobiographical amnesia), then comes the treatment. Or at least it would, if Alden was willing to stand still for it. But he’s still running for his life, remember, and he realizes that he can’t afford to sit around undergoing extensive therapy to try and recover his memory. While that’s happening, the killers could catch up to him again, and this time they might not miss. (They could keep him in the hospital, of course, but then who knows if his insurance covers it, or even if he has insurance? It’s not as if they can look him up.) The treatment, however, would almost certainly have been a course of psychological therapy. Now, in the early decades of the 20th century, the therapy might have consisted of “truth serum” drugs such as barbiturates and benzodiazepines, and doubtless there are those who might wonder why his doctors didn’t try that. In fact, however, those drugs weren’t very successful in dealing with cases of amnesia—while they did make it possible for the patient to speak more easily about things, they also lowered the threshold of suggestibility, with the result that the information from the patient lacked reliability. By the 1960s, that kind of treatment would have been out.
It’s far more likely that a course of psychoanalysis would be suggested, and I think it’s intriguing that one of the possible diagnoses to come from such treatment would have been along Freudian lines, by suggesting that his amnesia was a form of self-punishment, “with the obliteration of personal identity as an alternative to suicide.” I wonder if that will come up in the course of the series? Is it possible that Alden’s apparent dual identity at the start of the series has to do with something so secretive, so horrifying, that his subconscious simply can’t deal with it anymore, with the result that he tries to sweep it all clean? In an early episode, someone shrewdly observes that he has an opportunity few people ever get: to make a brand-new start to life, with no baggage, nothing linking him to the past. Is that what he’s subconsciously trying to do, to divorce himself from something he doesn’t want to be reminded of? In such conversations, Alden invariably states that all he’s interested in is the truth of who he is, and if it turns out that there’s something bad in his past (in one episode, he thinks he might be a killer), well, so be it—that’s the risk he’s willing to take
And this, Walter Cronkite would probably discover, is where the story ends. In cases involving brain damage, doctors may be able to find a cause, and perhaps a cure. But Michael Alden’s case remains a mystery. It is likely, but not certain, that his amnesia will eventually clear up. It may happen relatively quickly, or it may take a protracted period of psychoanalysis. But as to how or why it happens, and how or why it resolves itself? And what the amnesiac goes through, a man without a past, whose continued survival depends on reclaiming that past? It is, surely, part of the mysterious world of the amnesiac. One thing is for certain, however: the trauma that Michael Alden faces is one that most of us will never have to deal with. …
Don’t wait; that should be the moral of the story. Do your living now, while you can, while you can still live in the present. That’s what Michael Alden does, in Coronet Blue. He does it because he has no choice. And really, neither do we. Life is not meant for inertia, but for movement. Forward movement. However you can, wherever you can, whenever you can. Even if you’re not like Michael Alden.
But we have a couple of advantages over Mike: for one thing, he doesn’t know who’s shooting at him, but we know who’s shooting at us. Life is firing the bullets, and the one thing of which we can be certain is that one of them, somewhere, has your name on it, and another one has mine. For another, most of us don’t have to worry about our series being cancelled before we find out the answers.
There’s only one problem with this analogy, of course. We don’t know what “coronet blue” means either.
Come on. If you know cars you should be able to find a Dodge Coronet in blue …
… although finding one that isn’t in a blue and rust two-tone is a bigger challenge.
After this musical interlude …
… the first thought is that all of us who complain about the entertainment world’s lack of originality should realize that this is not a new phenomenon.
For those who want to know the secret of Coronet Blue, read this from IMDB.com:
Series Creator Larry Cohen, in his autobiography “The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker”, explained the mystery behind the series’ title and catchphrase. “When the Brodkin Organization took over the series, they wanted to turn it into an anthology. So they played down the amnesia aspect until there was nothing about it at all in the show. It was just Frank Converse wandering from one story to the next with no connective format at all. Anyway, the show ended after seventeen weeks and nobody found out what ‘coronet blue’ meant. The actual secret is that Converse was not really an American at all. He was a Russian who had been trained to appear like an American and was sent to the U.S. as a spy. He belonged to a spy unit called ‘Coronet Blue’. He decided to defect, so the Russians tried to kill him before he can give away the identities of the other Soviet Agents, and nobody can really identify him because he doesn’t exist as an American. Coronet Blue was actually an outgrowth of ‘The Traitor’ episode of The Defenders (1961).” However, anyone who has seen the show knows that the amnesia aspect was in fact not played down (one episode had Alden declining a golden opportunity to learn the truth about himself, or at least a good part of it, on moral grounds concerning the way the information became available to him). Other facts are that thirteen episodes were all that were filmed, and that from first air date to last is only fourteen weeks, fifteen potential weekly air dates if you include those at both ends, but only eleven of the episodes were aired. In any case, Cohen’s “seventeen weeks”, made in a book wherein he presumably had plenty of time to check and be certain that he got such fundamental facts correct, is indefensible. All this calls the validity of the entirety of his statement into question.
Maybe Cohen didn’t remember his own show. (Truth be told, most prolific TV producers appear to move on from one series to another. Gene Roddenberry took himself out of producing the third season of “Star Trek” and was working on other series, and probably would have forgotten about what became his most famous creation had it not survived after cancellation.)
Since the show lasted only one half-season as a summer replacement series, as with most other series Coronet Blue ended with no resolution. That prompts this comment from the original post:
I think I once read or heard that “Coronet Blue” had been filmed in 1965 with the intention of a January, 1966 premiere but the show was shelved and was kept “on the shelf” for a year-and-a-half.
“Coronet Blue” supposedly had high ratings when it finally aired in the Summer of 1967, but as star Frank Converse had committed himself to star in another series in the 1967-68 TV season (“N.Y.P.D.”), there was no way production of “Coronet Blue” as a weekly series could have resumed.
Even still, the producers of “Coronet Blue” COULD have made a two-hour TV-movie during one of “N.Y.P.D.”‘s production hiatuses, on which the loose ends could have been tied-up.
Since Coronet Blue was set in New York City, as obviously was “N.Y.P.D.” …
… the obvious solution would have been for Converse the detective to investigate the case of Converse the mysterious amnesiac.
And before you ask, if you put “Coronet Blue” and “N.Y.P.D.” together, you do not get …
The first GOP debate of the 2024 presidential primary season began on Fox News this week with an unusual prompt: a clip of a low-budget country song from an artist who had no public name recognition as of three weeks ago.
“’Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end,” singer Oliver Anthony proclaims with his thick red beard and a Southern drawl. “These rich men north of Richmond, lord knows they all just wanna have total control.”
Seemingly out of nowhere, the blue-collar track has exploded in popularity and shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Anthony made history by becoming the first singer-songwriter to top the chart without ever previously releasing a song. The hit has more than 37 million views in roughly two weeks on YouTube and is its No. 1 trending music video.
“Hollywood” has long been synonymous with progressive media. Republicans have scoffed at the powerful microphone that they believe liberal elites hold in television, film and music. And as the country becomes increasingly polarized, conservatives are coalescing to amplify their own voices.
In an interview with The Hill, Montclair State University associate professor Joel Penney, the author of “Pop Culture, Politics, and the News: Entertainment Journalism in the Polarized Media Landscape,” credited the rise in conservative entertainment to a newfound appreciation for it. The slightly older conservative media world “didn’t think that pop culture was even worthy of attention,” Penney said.
But now, he added, conservatives have realized “the path towards long-term political success [is] to take back the pop culture from the left, which they see as totally dominating the entertainment world.”
“Rich Men North of Richmond” has garnered passionate praise from firebrand right-wing figures including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
“This is the message that Washington needs to hear because this is how our people actually think and feel,” Greene posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Lake, who is eyeing a 2024 Senate bid, said that “It’s raw, it’s true, & it’s touching the hearts of men & women across this great nation.”
And Anthony isn’t alone in finding success this summer with a conservative audience that typically receives little attention from major artists.
Country star Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” also topped the Billboard chart with its right-leaning message.
“Got a gun that my granddad gave me. They say one day they’re gonna round up,” Aldean sings. “Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck.”
The corresponding music video was heavily criticized for its clips of Black Lives Matter protests set alongside footage of a store robbery, carjacking and images of people setting American flags on fire. The video was shot at the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., where 18-year-old Henry Choate was infamously lynched in 1927.
Country Music Television removed the song from its rotation, but Republicans jumped to defend it.
“Jason Aldean is a fantastic guy who just came out with a great new song. Support Jason all the way. MAGA!!!” former President Trump posted on his Truth Social account.
“When the media attacks you, you’re doing something right. [Aldean] has nothing to apologize for,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) echoed.
And the summer of red-state entertainment has not been confined to music.
Last month, faith-based thriller “Sound of Freedom” caught Hollywood by surprise, grossing more than the latest Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible films with its tale of a former federal agent rescuing children from sex trafficking.
Critics have slammed the movie for amplifying conspiracy theories surrounding child exploitation. The movie’s star, Jim Caviezel, who also played Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” is a prominent QAnon promoter, and the movie’s plot raises the same issue — child sex trafficking — at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy, which falsely claims that elite Democrats are involved in trafficking rings and cannibalism.
Prominent Republicans have praised the film. Trump hosted a private screening in Bedminster, N.J., and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) commented “Wow. Wow. Wow” after seeing it, urging followers to take the time to do the same.
The rise of these conservative pop culture hits is no coincidence. As politics increasingly invade all aspects of society, conservative artists such as Anthony and Aldean may see an opening to expand their fanbase and push back on institutions that the right has historically criticized for favoring Democrats over Republicans.
Penney said the summer’s viral moments have been “useful for the conservative movement because it expressed this kind of populist anger at elites.”
“[Republicans] saw this viral video as almost a political ad, the best political ad they could possibly find for the upcoming election cycle,” he said.
“There’s an authenticity that comes across particularly when he’s singing about peoples’ dissatisfaction with the economy and poor wages. … A lot of people are disenchanted with the way our economy is functioning.”
The success of “Sound of Freedom” and “Rich Men North of Richmond” suggest that Hollywood and the music industry may have overlooked an audience of conservatives eager to listen and watch media that better represents them and their views.
It’s too soon to tell whether these recent hits represent the start of a larger divide in entertainment — or if the summer of 2023 turns out to be a one-hit wonder for conservative pop culture.
More like three hits in the current case.
The country music audience has probably always been more traditional in worldview than, say, pop or rock music listeners. Conservative ideas do occasionally make it into pop music, even by people whose views may have shifted over time:
The grievance level conservatives feel about having their traditional morals spat upon by the modern world might be at an unprecedented level, though. Many conservatives have espoused boycotting pop culture — not going to movies, not watching TV and not buying recordings with whose views they disapprove. Beating the mainstream culture at its own game has to be satisfying at some level.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 