This Ad Paid For By the Committee to Elect Morons

Political ads are back once again to remind us just how painful watching live broadcast TV is. 

At the Emmys this year, there were a number of jokes about the death of broadcast television. Is there any way that someone could pull the plug before the mid-term elections?

On Sunday, I was tricked into watching live television on my actual TV. OK, I wasn't technically tricked, but the Philadelphia Eagles were on so I didn't want to just watch NFL RedZone, and I was doing other things so I leaving the channel on during commercial breaks.

By happenstance, my sons were in the living room even though neither of them likes football. but something on screen did catch their eyes and it wasn't Carson Wentz.

They noticed that there were back-to-back political ads where fist the Democrat accused the incumbent Republican of being "too Washington," and then the Republican accused the Democrat of being "too Washington" for having worked for a lobbying firm.

Their reaction was that the dueling ads seemed stupid. I casually agreed that it is, in fact, stupid. Why do they do it then, they asked.

I found myself explaining that from a marketing perspective, you hope that if you just bombard people with the same message -- "I'm good, my opponent is bad" -- that when the time comes for a "buying" decision, that's the main thing that a consumer will remember. Changing the words to "voting" and "voter" just makes it more compressed and emphatic. And, both sides have to do it because, asinine as it might seem, it's been proven that the strategy will work if only one side employs it. Further, it can still work if one side does it significantly better than the other (looking at you, Democrats). 



I only briefly explained that the whole "too Washington" part is moronic because if you're going to serve in Congress and you don't know how to navigate the federal political system then you're going to be wholly ineffective. Don't want to become "too Washington"? Run for state office then.

The only saving grace is that it wasn't one of the recent trends in political ads, which seems more prevalent with Senate campaigns, where they basically say, "Don't vote for him/her... he/she's a Democrat and sides with Democrats on issues!" and then the other party does the same thing in reverse. Thanks for letting us know that Democrats behave like Democrats and Republicans behave like Republicans, geniuses. I hate "preaching to the choir" strategies.

Since if one side does it that means the other has to follow suit, I told my kids, then the rest of us are made to suffer while watching broadcast (and some basic cable) TV or listening to the radio for two months before any election. It happens every single time even though political ads are universally despised by everyone except the individual candidate, their family, and the poor souls working on that campaign.

Really, though, what it made me think of is that were I running Netflix, I would totally be encouraging every politician in the country to run as many ads as possible. If there's ever been a stronger argument for abandoning broadcast TV than the threat of having to listen to one politician who sucks, tell us why another politician, who also sucks, sucks worse than they do... well, I've not heard it.

Hating In the Boys Room

"Boys will be boys"? It's never a good excuse, but when it comes to hate, it's completely unacceptable.

Yesterday, I took my son to meet with his new high school teachers for the first time. The school was having an Open House for that purpose in the evening, but with Martin on the Autism Spectrum, it works better if he goes when there's time to discuss what he needs.

Everything went smoothly, right until the end, when Martin and Casey went to use the bathroom. While I was standing and talking to one of the Special Ed. teachers, Martin came back with an odd look on his face. "Um, hey," he muttered, trying to come up with the right way to say it. "There's some inappropriate graffiti in there."

As the teacher went to try to find the school's principal, I had the boys show me the graffiti. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting but it definitely wasn't what I found.

WTF?

Inside of one of the stalls was a drawing of a Clansman lynching a stick figure, who was helpfully labelled as "Black." There were multiple swastikas. The letters "KKK" were sprinkled in at regular intervals. All that was missing was a drawing of a guy with a Tiki torch.

When I returned to the teacher, she was still trying to track down the principal. Once we found him, the teacher quickly explained the situation and what the boys had found. His response was astounding.

"In the one boy's bathroom?" he asked. "I know, it's been there since last year."

The teacher paused for a second before exclaiming, "The hanging one has been there since last year?"

I pulled up the photos that I had taken and showed them to the principal, hoping that maybe we were talking about two different things. The principal, who was trying to give directions to the staff setting up for the Open House, glanced at my phone and said, "I know, it's terrible. I was livid when I found out about it."

He explained that the school's maintenance group said that because of the coating on the doors, that there was no way to repair or cover it up. He said that they said the only way to take care of it would've been to remove the stalls. Another adult in the group said, "Maybe that's what should have happened."

The Shifting of Blame

After leaving the school, I apprised my sons' mother of the situation, which made her understandably angry at the response I had received. She met the boys and I at the school for the Open House, and as we went in, she made it clear that she was planning on pushing the school to address the situation... quickly.

When I had been there earlier in they day, there had been a brief talk about covering the graffiti up, at least temporarily, with people coming back into the school. Before we said anything, though, I went to check to see if that had at least happened. It hadn't.

From there, I let my ex-wife take the lead since she was already in attack mode. She might be small, but she has no trouble taking on anyone when she knows that she's right. Many in the boys' school system had learned a long-time ago that it was a bad idea to underestimate her -- including the principal.


She had the principal explain again why the graffiti was still visible in the bathroom. He offered details about the investigation that had been conducted after it was originally found, but still provided no explanation for why it was still there.

He repeated his assertion that the maintenance people had said that there was nothing that they could do. "There are literally three things that I can think of off the top of my head to cover it up," the boys' mom clapped back.

The school system has a new superintendent, so in the end, we ended up explaining the situation to her and accepted her assurance that it would be addressed. Living in a small community, it's easy enough to follow up on that to make sure that it happens.

Uncomfortable Life Lessons

My sons are not worldly, but they're not completely uninformed. Where their parents would've both read a newspaper daily at their age, they get information a different, more Millennial, way. One of those ways, thanks to my having covered the show for four seasons, has been through SNL's "Weekend Update."

Sure, they hear stories while their folks listen to NPR and they learn current events in school, but just like the generations that grew up with The Daily Show, Martin and Casey have a tendency to view the ridiculousness of real life through a comedic prism.

While their reaction was to joke, especially Martin who has trouble with social niceties as it is, there was nothing funny about this one. And, I'm saying that as an Irish Catholic comedy writer, who regularly used his father's funeral for a routine.

I'm confident that, as parents, we can explain to our sons what is wrong with hateful graffiti. The fact is, though, that my kids don't actually need that explained. Their parents have taught them since birth that racism is wrong and that you don't judge anyone for any reasons beyond the type of person that they are.

Complicity by Apathy

Seeing a swastika carved into a bathroom stall in a gas station bathroom is, unfortunately, a fairly normal sight. Having it left standing in a junior high/high school is an entirely different situation. Allowing graffiti that depicts the Ku Klux Klan lynching an African-American to stand for nearly a year in a school is unbelievable to the point of feeling farcical.

How do you allow preteen and teenage boys to spend a year seeing graffiti that could be considered a hate crime? How do you, through a lack of action, make it seem like the views represented in the graffiti are in anyway acceptable?

The answer is that there really is no excuse for it. It's easy to say that it was done by impressionable teens who were probably just doing it to get a reaction, and that it doesn't necessarily reflect what they've been taught or how they truly feel.

Even if that were true, allowing that inflammatory message to remain up teaches a lesson that cannot be endorsed by any educational institution in our country. Trying to downplay racism and hate, in the end, provides a larger forum for those who would espouse those views than they deserve.

That a public school administration needs to be told that it's wrong to keep hateful messages visible to the entire male population of its student body is as disturbing as any Alt-Right rally throughout the country. This isn't about the people who take the extremist views that lead to someone going into a church or mosque and shooting innocent people. This is about the countless others in communities throughout the United States who shrug and say that there's nothing that they can do about it.

The apathy of citizens is far more dangerous than the messages being put forth by any fringe elements of our society, no matter what side of the political spectrum we're talking about. Having the administration of a school take the same apathetic approach is wholly unacceptable. Even if only one child takes away from that lack of response that racism and hate are acceptable, that's one too many.

When a 14-year-old with an Autism Spectrum Disorder is able to recognize what's wrong with a situation quicker and more effectively than school administrators, that's a problem.

We rely on public schools to teach our children in ways that will make them better adults. Unfortunately, it seems that there are still some lessons that the people running those schools have yet to learn.

Citizen Trump: Updated Classics for the New (Alt) Reality

As President Trump and his supporters have noted, Hollywood and the creative community, as a whole, has been loath to give the New York billionaire and former The Apprentice star much credit. They protest that Hollywood is out of touch with how common Americans feel about issues, which is part of the reason that the "elites" in NY and LA don't understand why they, as law-abiding, God-fearing, Constitution-upholding citizens, love a man of the people like Trump.

While others might be slow to get with the program, I'm happy to take advantage of an opportunity when I see one, and in a manner that Trump himself would surely appreciate, I'm not above stealing ideas for my own personal profit.

With The Donald now in charge of the entire world, there is a century's worth of films that can be easily reworked to fit in more readily with a Trumpian view. (And, before you say, "some of these were books first," let me just say this -- no one reads and no one cares about books, you elitist twerp. That said, we will, of course, modify the books to comply with the new versions approved by the supreme ruler.) This group of heretofore beloved classics should get a facelift pronto to make them more appealing to the Trump set.

A Christmas Carol - Scrooge is allowed to manage his rental properties however he sees fit, without interference from a bunch of liberal snowflakes. Bob Cratchit receives "family time" in lieu of holiday or overtime pay, and considering what a sniveling wuss he is, he should be happy he has a job at all. Unfortunately, because of Tiny Tim's pre-existing condition he's ineligible for coverage on Bob's employee plan, which Scrooge so generously supplies. The youngster dies, but that was obviously God's will.

Citizen Kane - As the only person publishing the truth in his newspaper (which, for the record, easily outsold every other newspaper in the country), Kane is, of course, vilified by the liberal mainstream media. While they attempt to derail his political ambitions just because of some floozy -- who seduced him, by the way -- the people of New York rightly see through the MSM attacks and elect Kane anyway. He turns out to be a brilliant politician, is elected President of the United States, and saves the country from the crooked Democratic congress. Oh yeah, and "Rosebud" turns out to just be the nickname that he gave his smokin' hot daughter.  

First Blood - John Rambo is welcomed to town by the Sheriff and his men, who thank the Vietnam veteran for his service. Rambo is enlisted by the Sheriff's department to assist them in dispatching a group of protesters who are unjustly holding up construction on a pipeline project that will reinvigorate the local economy. The whiny little tree huggers are dispatched with extreme force and Rambo gladly accepts one of the many jobs that are created by the pipeline.

It's a Wonderful Life - George Bailey, acting on some inside information, invests heavily in plastics and makes a killing. He trades Mary in for a younger model, while still occasionally banging Violet and, later her daughter, on the side. His real estate holdings explode in value once the suburban sprawl of the '50s takes hold and George eventually leaves his vast fortune to his ambitious, handsome son, who is an even better businessman than his father.

Fahrenheit 451 - Guy Montag turns Clarisse and her family in immediately for their subversive thoughts, and they are executed. He happily returns to burning books and lives a nice, conforming life with his wife, Mildred. In the updated book version, which is now only 20 pages long, readers are encouraged at the end to burn the book immediately and never read again.

Caddyshack - Young caddy Danny Noonan sees the error of his ways and takes Judge Smails up on his generous offer, earning a scholarship and, later, a prestigious clerkship thanks to the Judge's patronage. Al Czervik does, in fact, buy Bushwood Country Club, but instead of building condos on the site, hires Jack Nicklaus to redesign the course and triples the membership fees, smartly pocketing all of the profits. He keeps Smails around because it's never a bad idea to have a judge in your back pocket when you're in real estate.

Wall Street - Gordon Gekko is rightly hailed for his "greed is good" stance and becomes a sympathetic character for having to put up with squeamish little weasels, like Bud Fox, who don't have the stones to do something as simple as screw over their own father. He spots Bud's plan to undercut his deal for the airline a mile away, since he's so much smarter and better looking than his young protégé. Bud tries to entrap his mentor for the FBI, but since Gekko didn't do anything wrong, it doesn't work. The film ends with Bud begging Gekko for another chance, only to be told, "You're fired."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows - With bleeding-heart Dumbledore out of the way, Voldemort and his band of patriots take over the Ministry of Magic and, by extension, Hogwarts. Mudbloods like Hermione Granger are deported to the Muggle world where they belong, as the new leadership begins to immediately roll back the wizarding regulations that Dumbledore and his like thrust upon the magical community while ignoring the common wizard. "Crying" Harry Potter, as expected, can't handle his defeat and goes around blaming others for his failures. Voldemort doesn't kill him or sentence him to Azkaban because, really, who cares about losers?

No Country for Old Men - Now framed as a cautionary tale that Sheriff Bell tells Texas school children about why it is so important that we build a wall on the Mexican border to keep out the drug dealing bad hombres.

A Few Good Men - Crybaby Navy lawyer Lt. Kaffee realizes that he actually can't handle the truth and that he does need Colonel Jessup "up on that wall." He then excuses the Colonel from the stand so that he can get back to doing whatever is necessary to keep America safe, no questions asked.

Little Women - Instead of sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are now supermodels who are all married to very rich, very powerful and extremely handsome men. The ladies go shopping together, do yoga and spin classes together, take care of the kids and do whatever their extremely successful and powerful husbands tell them to do. Has franchise potential, since it could be updated every few years with the next generation of hot actresses (the male leads will, of course, remain the same).

The Birth of a Nation - Since it's nearly perfect, it just needs to be updated with sound and color. The D.W. Griffith 1915 KKK one, that is. The one with the same name from 2016 never should have been made, since the black guy who wrote and directed it probably should've been in jail.

Red Dawn - Well, since Russia is now our ally and wouldn't do anything that would be counterproductive to the welfare of the United States, the country is now attacked by the North Koreans after China refuses to do anything to rein them in. Wait, someone already did this one? No kidding… with one of the Hemsworth brothers? OK, well, never mind then.

An Inconvenient Truth - It's all a lie. End of movie.

Re-Living Aid

I mentioned in an earlier post that I saw a clip of Live Aid that made me think back to 1985. Spending the weekend largely with a series of writing projects that required some background noise provided the perfect excuse to dig out the DVD set of the event and watch it. I don't know that I actually set out to re-watch the whole thing, but that's what happened. Having also spent a chunk of my career reviewing music -- and trying to avoid the next project -- I decided that the hours shouldn't go past without offering my thoughts... especially since the cats have made it clear that they don't care about '80s music in the slightest.

I'm going to start with the social part of this little exercise. Included in the DVD set is the original BBC News report that caused The Boomtown Rats lead singer Bob Geldof to try to raise funds to assist the victims of the Ethiopian famine. As Americans, it's part of our Constitutional rights to complain about anything and everything... and we usually do. If you want some perspective, though, go watch a 10 minute news story that shows children literally dying from hunger while the cameras are rolling. It doesn't matter that the video is more than 30 years old because I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't take much at all to find similar pain and suffering right now in the areas of the world that we don't like to think about.

OK, with that out of the way, the most obvious question related to the little nostalgia trip is how does it hold up? Just sticking with the music, the answer is surprisingly well. The fashion is awful and I don't think anyone in their right mind is clamoring for a return of the mullet, but the music mostly still works. The set at London's Wembley Stadium is decidedly cleaner than the one at the old JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, but considering how poorly other events around the time hold up (I'm looking at you US Festival), there's way more good than bad.

Not everything falls into that "good" category, of course. REO Speedwagon hasn't gotten any better with age (and, as an aside, can someone remind me why the Beach Boys and Paul Shaffer were onstage with them?) The Black Sabbath reunion with Ozzy Osbourne has the singer being... well, Ozzy. He looks vaguely confused about where he is but also doesn't look like he cares enough to try to figure it out.

The set with Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood is as much of a mess decades later as it was on the night. (Despite three-fifths of the Rolling Stones being there, Mick Jagger played separately... I'm assuming because he and Keith were having a row.)

The Woodstock-era holdovers, like Joan Baez and Neil Young, fare particularly poorly. It's like they didn't know what they were doing there... as if they felt like they were part of a protest but no one told them what they were protesting.

The Philly set, as I said, seemed to have been thrown together with little thought of cohesion. How else do you explain Crosby, Stills & Nash being followed by Judas Priest, who are, in turn, followed by Bryan Adams. The whole day at JFK was a bit of a mishmash, plagued by sound problems and a Led Zeppelin reunion that was so bad -- with Phil Collins and Power Station's Tony Thompson seemingly playing different songs at the same time on the drums -- that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page still won't let anyone see it again.

"We Are the World" hasn't stopped being an awful song. Why no one ever stepped in to tell Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie that the song is annoyingly schlocky is beyond me. I'm not quibbling about the pair's songwriting abilities, especially Richie, but for the love of God, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan -- you know, some of the greatest song writers of the 20th century -- were all part of the recording. No one saw the song before they got there?

Like always the show closing sing-alongs with everyone on stage don't work, but like Geldof says before leading the Wembley crowd through Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?," "if you're going to have a cock-up, it might as well be a cock-up in front of 2-billion people."

Even though I was a teenager at the time, there are some things that I don't remember from when it happened live. For example, I have no idea where I was when The Thompson Twins, Madonna, Nile Rodgers and guitar god Steve Stevens did their rendition of The Beatles' "Revolution," but I have zero memory of it.

So, what is worth watching again, even if just on YouTube?

For the most part, the British acts, perhaps because it started out as their cause, are almost uniformly good. Acts that never gained as much traction in the States, like Paul Young and The Style Council have little trouble revving up the London crowd. Then, there's the reminder of just how staggeringly beautiful Sade is.



Bono and U2 has been around so long that we take them for granted, but at 25, Bono was a complete badass. He's in complete control at Live Aid. In another two years, The Joshua Tree would launch them into the stratosphere, but U2 was clearly just waiting for the world to catch up to them in '85.




The round-robin of Phil Collins playing with Sting, who then goes and plays with Dire Straits is fun, even if the former front men for Genesis and The Police didn't really capitalize on having an audience of 72,000 right in front of them. Still, if you're old enough to remember it, having Sting sing "I want my MTV," at the start of Straits' "Money For Nothing" while being broadcast live on MTV was about as cool as it got in the mid-'80s.



Queen's performance is legendary and it's still awesome no matter how many times that you've seen it. In fact, here it is:



There is nothing like the Wembley crowd doing the hand-clap from "Radio Ga-Ga." The story forever has been that every act who had to follow Freddie Mercury wanted to kill him for setting the bar that high.

Another story is that Elton John's set was almost cut for time in London before George Michael stepped in to offer up a portion of his Wham! time to his hero. Not only is Elton in good form, but there's a live rendition of "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" with Kiki Dee, and Michael nails John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down." (Then there's the added bonus of John forgetting that the other half of Wham!, Andrew Ridgeley, is even there, so he forgets to introduce him, and Ridgeley not caring because he looks completely hammered.)



Similarly, David Bowie is stellar playing his '80s edition of The Thin White Duke. If there's any artist who made those ridiculous '80s get-ups look good it was Bowie. While Paul McCartney's closing "Let It Be" is, at best, perfunctory, it's still funny when The Who's Pete Townsend decides to tickle Macca while he's tickling the ivories.

Even the Brits who were in Philly provided a spark. Even if they couldn't be further apart stylistically, Eric Clapton and Duran Duran sounded like they were trying to match what they had seen on TV from their countrymen. The Pretenders do the same, which the only American in the group, lead singer Chrissie Hynde, kept marrying British guys.



It's also funny to see Madonna in a mid-show slot, with her star still on the rise. Its more interesting to see the Material Girl getting winded as she whips through her choreography while she keeps singing. Remember when it was ok for a singer to do that?




It's even funnier to watch the almost entirely white audience in Philly figuring out how to react to Run-DMC in their Adidas and slamming through "King of Rock." About a quarter of the audience are into it, and it's not the segment that was there to see Sabbath and Zeppelin.




One of the other things that anyone who watched Live Aid while it was happening remembers are the spots that were played continuously during the broadcast, asking for donations and showing starving people while The Cars' "Drive" played. By the end, everyone was pretty much sick of hearing that song, but looking at it now, the set that Rick Ocasek, Benjamin Orr (the singer of "Drive") and the rest of the Boston-bred band delivered was mighty tight.



The most consistent part of the JFK show is the early evening portion. Philly native Patti Labelle crushed John Lennon's "Imagine" and Dylan's "Forever Young." It gets even better when fellow City of Brotherly Love resident's Hall & Oates invite The Temptations' Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin out for their performance.



Jagger's contribution is the part that a lot of Americans remember since it happened in prime time. It's also memorable because it's as close to a live sex act as you could get on television as the Rolling Stones singer and Tina Turner keep trading thrusts.




Again, that's an awful lot of highlights for a fundraiser held more than 30 years ago. It's also not a bad thing to remember that there was a time when the term Social Justice Warrior was a designation that most people wanted. The music wasn't bad either.