Shock Value, Swedish Style
The less relevant people or institutions are, the further they’re willing to go in order to garner attention. I’ve seen it with aging movie directors.
The less relevant people or institutions are, the further they’re willing to go in order to garner attention. I’ve seen it with aging movie directors. Whereas Alfred Hitchcock often leavened his suspense thrillers with humor and even romance, when he became an old shadow of his younger, better self, he began turning out crapola like “Frenzy” and “Torn Curtain,” movies that escalated violence and gore in hopes of attracting an audience.
Even my friend, Billy Wilder, who had been responsible for writing or writing and directing the likes of “Ninotchka,” “The Major & the Minor,” “Double Indemnity,” “Lost Weekend,” “Sunset Blvd.,” “The Apartment” and “Some Like it Hot,” finally resorted to churning out cinematic bilge that included “Avanti!” “Fedora,” “Buddy Buddy” and the loathsome semi-pornographic “Kiss Me, Stupid.”
Some novelists have also prostituted themselves in hopes of remaining fashionable when beset with changing times and tastes.
Most recently, we have seen it happen with magazines. The New Yorker was once famous for its writers and cartoonists. People would pick up every issue, knowing they would read the latest work of James Thurber, J.D. Salinger, John O'Hara and Truman Capote and see cartoons by Peter Arno, Charles Addams, William Steig and Gahan Wilson. Today, it’s just another schlock magazine that shoehorns some snarky comments about President Trump even into book and movie reviews.
But, possibly the most desperate example of attempting to hang in there even when their subscriptions are probably fewer than mine is Time magazine. Before TV and the Internet made it as passé as high button shoes, it served a purpose. In breezy fashion, it covered the news of the past week in every field from art and books to medicine and industry.
These days, it is so frantic to make news instead of report it, they made fools of themselves by naming 16 year old Swedish scold Greta Thunberg their Person of the Year. Of course if this were a different time and a different Time, the magazine would probably have selected President Trump or the brave demonstrators defying the Chinese despots by carrying the American flag in the streets of Hong Kong.
In its typical understated way, in announcing its youngest ever selection, the magazine declared, with a presumably straight face: “She has succeeded in creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change. She has offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled shame on those who are not.”
Fortunately, I heard or smelled the shame just in time and managed to duck. Otherwise, I would have surely wound up with a face full of gravadlax and meatballs. And that stuff is really hard to get off.
It turns out that even though she is only 16, Ms. Thunberg has been worried sick about this stuff since she was eight. Not too surprisingly, she was diagnosed at the age of 11 with Asperger syndrome, found to be obsessive-compulsive (OCD) and suffering from something called selective mutism. But brave little scout that she is, she insists: “It’s not an illness, it’s a super power!”
Once again, the question arises when someone is certifiably nuts whether it’s a case of nature or nurture. Was she born with this massive ego or did others spread the manure which allowed it to reach such gargantuan proportions. Although I’m not a board-certified psychiatrist, I often play one on my computer. My considered opinion is that in this teenager’s case, it was both.
Her mother, Melena Ernman gave up her career as a successful opera singer because Greta shamed her over her frequent travel on airliners. Talk about a guilt trip. Her father, Svante Thunberg, is a sometime actor who has apparently traded it in for a career as his daughter’s manager.
Little Greta has also managed to make her family go vegan for the sake of the planet. The snarling teenage bully has said that it was her family’s compliance with her orders that has given her hope for the planet’s future. Apparently, the clincher came when she accused her parents of being part of the conspiracy to “steal her future.”
I make no claim to being the reincarnation of Nostradamus, but after making the cover of Time, I’m guessing that a Nobel Peace Prize can’t be far behind.
In typical California fashion, our legislature has fallen even deeper into the world of insanity by passing a law that nobody can be jailed for car theft unless the owner can prove that he had locked it. Otherwise, presumably, the legislators regard it as an attractive nuisance and theft is therefore inevitable. I assume that at a later session, they will also require that home owners prove that all their doors and windows were locked and barred before burglars will be prosecuted. As for rape victims, it only stands to reason they will have to prove they were wearing chastity belts and that the rapist cut the lock before he entered the premises.
The House continues down the path to impeach the President. The Democrats swear it pains them to do it, but their commitment to protecting America demands they carry out their solemn duty.
But, as the polls show, after watching these schmoes spend three years trying to dig up a crime that justifies removing Donald Trump from office, most Americans have decided it’s the Democrats who should be committed to an institution for the criminally insane.
The House Democrats are accusing the President of abuse of power. But what they really mean is use of power. It pains me to admit it, but the Democrats were smarter than I was back in 2016. They wanted Trump impeached from Day One. I recall at the time wondering why they were so upset. Hell, most of them hated Hillary Clinton as much as I did. After all, I assumed that Trump would be another Bush-like nonentity. He turned out, as we’ve discovered, to be Ronald Reagan on steroids, but how the heck did those morons know?
If Michael Horowitz had merely listed the crimes of commission and omission by the FBI and stopped short of pulling a James Comey and pretending they weren’t motivated by political partisanship, he would have done his duty. Instead, he has made people wonder what the point of even having an Inspector General is if he sees his role as one of soft-soaping the facts.
It was as if some German bureaucrat had spent a year and millions of Deutschmarks proving in 1946 that Adolf Hitler had indeed killed six million Jews, but then concluded that he could discover no evidence of anti-Semitism behind his actions.
In California, we keep releasing criminals from prison because the jails, we’re told, are too crowded. The obvious solution would be to build more prisons, but California liberals don’t like prisons because, inevitably, most of the inmates wind up being black and Latino gangbangers.
Because, when I’m not acting as a psychiatrist, I moonlight as a merchandising guru, my plan is to sell the idea by calling it low-cost housing for the poor. Well, of course, it would be mainly for poor criminals. But who the heck ever reads the small print?
