Entry 681: When Is It Wrong For A Storyteller To Tell Stories?

I was going to wrap this into my previous entry, but I feel it works better as a standalone post, so you get a double dose of me this week. Yay, you.

If you are familiar with Hasan Minhaj, you probably know why I asked the question in the title of this entry. If you are not familiar with him, I'll give you the quick skinny: He's a comedian who does a lot of standup, a little acting, and he hosted a Netflix talk show called Patriot Act for a few years. Most of his act consists of personal anecdotes, so much so that it might be more accurate to describe him as a humorous monologuist. He's a first-generation Muslim Indian-American, and a lot of his comedy is centered around the religious and racial discrimination he faces in a post-9/11 America... or doesn't. Last week, Clare Malone of The New Yorker dropped a profile piece detailing how pretty much none of the stories he tells in his show actually happened. They are either outright fabrications or exaggerated to the point that there is no meaningful difference between them and outright fabrications.

This raises some interesting ethical questions about when storytellers are allowed to lie and when they are not. Minhaj's defense of his act is that, although it might not be factually true, it's emotionally true, and comedians frequently use hyperbole for effect. Some people buy this argument, others do not. Thinking on it a bit, I've found myself very much in the latter category. I don't think it's right what Minhaj did. I think it was fraudulent at worst, and manipulative and phony at best. I agree that it's okay for comedians to make things up sometimes -- it's entertainment, after all, not a legal deposition --  but they need to ask themselves some questions and earnestly consider the answers first.

Will the audience think it's true, and will they feel let down if they learn otherwise?

This is where Minhaj's specific brand of comedy is relevant. Nobody cares if Mitch Hedberg actually has a package of Life Savers in his pocket or if Brad Williams really scared a guy away during a fight, because those are clearly just jokes -- the humor is the humor. But in Minhaj's act, a lot of the humor comes from a previously established buy-in from the audience. It's emotionally based, trust based. He makes us feel one way, and then flips it, and we laugh at that incongruity. That initial buy-in from the audience is incredibly important, and it is much more powerful if we believe what he's saying is literally true.

I really liked a lot of Minhaj's stuff. In fact, I once wrote a fawning entry about him on this blog, about a story he told on a podcast. It was very funny, but also incredibly moving and thought-provoking, and, yes, I feel let down that now I suspect it's total bullshit. There is a gravitas to something true that is much more difficult to achieve with something fictitious. And I think Minhaj's knows this, which is why he never let on that his stories weren't real, until he was exposed. Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld openly say that their comedy is all a put-on, and I believe Minhaj should have done the same a long time ago.*

*I find his defense that his stories are emotionally true to be extremely weak. He sounds like Jesse Eisenberg in The Squid and the Whale saying that he could have written the Pink Floyd song he plagiarized.

I actually went through something like this in my own little way. I wrote a crossword puzzle book, in which I include a short personal anecdote with each puzzle. I very quickly learned that it is almost impossible (for me, at least) to write something compelling, concise, and totally truthful. So, I just put a disclaimer at the beginning of the book saying that my stories were not completely factual. Had Minhaj done something like this with his comedy from the get-go, this whole thing would be a complete non-issue. But he didn't. On the contrary, he reiterated accounts from his act, as if they were fact, even in non-stage settings, like interviews. It's tough to defend that.

Is your work just for entertainment or also for making broader social and political points?

Minhaj's comedy definitely falls into the latter category, and this is another reason why I think it was unethical for him to present his anecdotes as true. One can very easily see what I mean by flipping the politics. If a conservative comedian told stories on stage in the same manner as Minhaj, but they were about being mugged by immigrants or seeing drag queens perform adult material in front of children, and then when it came out that these things never happened, the comedian defended them as emotional truths, would liberals shrug and say Fair enough, it's your lived experience that really matters? Of course not. They would be decrying it as propaganda, which it would be. But then shouldn't the same standard apply to Minhaj? Or is it only wrong if somebody you don't like does it?

 Are real people falsely depicted in a negative manner in your stories?

This is another reason I wanted to admit up-front in my book that the things I was saying weren't true. If you lie about other people, that seems way worse to me than lying about yourself or inventing people whole-cloth.* And Minhaj did lie about real people. He said a real FBI informant "Brother Eric" infiltrated his mosque, and it never happened, and worse, he said a girl spurned him on prom night, because her parents didn't want their daughter dating a brown boy. That also never happened -- she broke things off with him before prom night and says it was because of typically teenage shit and didn't have anything to do with her parents or his race. (She's now married to an Indian man, if that matters to you at all.) Minhaj never called her out by name, but he gives enough details about her, including showing a picture with only her face blurred, that Clare Malone didn't seem to have any trouble figuring out who she was. That's a pretty fucked up thing to do to somebody.

*I used a lot composite characters in my book so that it would be difficult for any single person to identify themselves in it.

The last thing I'll say about this is that there is a cost to be paid by others in your community when you lie about being victimized. It needlessly scares people and causes unnecessary mental anguish. This is something I wish liberals took to heart more often. How are Indian-Americans served by believing that society is more racist than it really is? It seems to me, the only real beneficiaries of Minhaj's tall tales are himself and right-wingers who say elite Hollywood liberals are obsessed with fake victimhood. This is the biggest gift they've received since Jussie Smollett.

Anyway, there's some other stuff in the article about how Minhaj didn't like the female fact-checkers* who worked for Patriot Act and would frequently ice them out of the production process, but you can read about all that if you like. I think I've said enough on this issue.

Until next time...

*They have alleged sex-based discrimination against Minaj, but now he has a really good defense: I'm not sexist; I just don't like facts!

 

Entry 680: Things I'm Consuming In The Media

Thought I'd do a political entry today, as it's been awhile since my last one. Talking politics isn't enjoyable for me these days, but part of what I want from this blog is for it to be a time capsule of my thoughts -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- and it will be glaringly incomplete if I don't occasionally write about politics. So, here we go.

I'm going to format this post by linking to things in the media I've recently consumed and then giving my thoughts on them.

Mitt Romney Announces He Won't Seek Reelection In 2024

Remember when "binders full of women" was considered the most awful, sexist thing a presidential candidate could say?* How much would you give to go back to those days? Sorry, Mitt, for all the unkind things I said and wrote about you back in 2012. It was probably all true, but if I knew how much worse it could get, I would've let it slide. I wouldn't even have mentioned the fact that you ran expressly on repealing Obamacare, even after implementing the same basic plan in Massachusetts and calling it "a model for the nation" just a few years earlier. Such commentary seems so petty now, when we are all wondering what happens if somebody is elected president while in the midst of multiple criminal trials. 

*I joke, but even at the time, despite not being a Romney fan, I thought this was a silly thing for people to get exercised about. 

It's funny, I was thinking about when I first got interested in politics, as an insufferable Nader-ite, back around the turn of the millennium, and the biggest problem with our political system, as I saw it, was that our two parties were too alike and too beholden to corporate interests. As Noam Chomsky put it: "In the US, there is basically one party -- the business party." But, oh, do I long for those days now. I'd take them in a heartbeat over our current shitshow. The business party sounds just fine to me.

It's gotten so bad that while listening to an interview with Chris Christie on NPR the other day, I started fantasizing about somehow skipping the election and just instating him as president. Can we do that? Is there a clause in the constitution that would allow us to agree as a country to just make him president? I mean, I don't really want him to be president. Of course I don't, but neither does his own party, so it's fair. Both sides go away unhappy. But since we would be guaranteed to not get another term of either Trump or Biden, both sides would also go away happy. It's an adequate compromise. If only...

Biden Is Losing Ground With Black and Latino Voters

The linked article is actual somewhat "positive" for Biden, in that it is mainly about how, although Biden has a slimmer lead over Trump in national polls than he did in 2020, he seems to be maintaining the same edge in battleground states.* But one thing that caught my eye is that Trump seems to have gained support among nonwhite voters overall. I wish that this surprises me, but it doesn't. Part of this shift is probably just the push-and-pull of coalition building. When you gain in one area, like Biden did with suburban women in 2020, you might lose in a different area, because, given real-world constraints, it's impossible to keep everybody happy all the time. Also, it should be noted that Biden still holds a significant -- although reportedly not as significant as three years ago -- advantage over Trump among nonwhite voters.

*With the stated caveat that any analysis this far out has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Although, it did make me entertain the possibility of Biden losing the popular vote but winning the election. Wouldn't that be a doozy?

Still, it's a bit disconcerting for those of us dreading the prospect of another Trump term to see such data. And I suspect it's not so much that he's gaining nonwhite voters as it is that Biden, Democrats in general, are losing them. I further suspect the reason for this is something I've expressed concern over in the past: Democrats are becoming increasingly incapable of winning over anybody but highly-educated, affluent voters. They've already lost almost all the white voters who don't fit this criteria, and my worry is that now we're seeing that happen with nonwhite voters.

Why is this my worry? 

A little bit of bad policy and a lot of bad messaging.

On policy, I think Dems mostly dropped the ball by not reopening things quickly enough after the Covid shutdowns, and this has had a disproportionately negative effect on working-class folks, who can't work from home, can't afford nannies and tutors, and don't have much savings to fall back on. I remember shortly after the 2020 election listening to a Latino woman in Florida speak about Ron Desantis, and she spent a solid two minutes blasting his awful, dehumanizing immigration stunts, and then at the end she said that she voted for him. When asked why, she replied that she owned a nail salon, and if the Democrat won she thought she'd go out of business.

Another policy position that might be bad -- kinda sneaky-bad -- with working-class voters is Biden's college debt relief decree. Before it was blocked by the Supreme Court, I was reading a thread about it online, and the non-college-educated commenters did not like it. Is this representative of a wider sentiment? I couldn't say, but it makes some sense: By definition, tuition debt relief only helps the highly educated, and if you're somebody who specifically chose to not incur debt, to not go to college, to possibly put yourself at a disadvantage in the job market, then, yeah, it's understandable that you'd be peeved about it. It would be hard not to feel like the chump in that circumstance.

School choice might be another one. Dems are mostly against it (teachers' unions don't like it), but I've heard working-class families sing its praises. Again, it's tough to say with certainty whether they speak for a larger contingent, but again it makes sense if they do: The traditional neighborhood system forces poor families in underperforming districts to attend their subpar local schools, while affluent families can move to districts with higher-achieving schools (which is exactly what we did). In practice, the neighborhood system is one of choice -- but only for people who can afford it.

On messaging, I think left-coded institutions, not even necessarily Democratic politicians themselves, but universities, advocacy groups, and certain media and online spaces, increasingly speak in a way that only resonates with highly educated, affluent liberals -- nobody else seems to like it or understand it. The epitome of this is Latinx, which I hear from time to time on places like NPR, despite the fact that it polls terribly among the people to which it's referring, and Hispanic Democrats like Ruben Gallego constantly plea with progressives to stop using it.

And there are myriad other vocabulary examples like this. Many institutions put out their own equity language guides filled with them. Personally, I can't think of a better way to alienate people who might otherwise be open to your cause. Implying that pretty much all of society speaks the wrong way, and that everybody should adopt your more evolved vocabulary, is just about the worst way to win influence with people I can think of. The way we speak is very personal, and we can be very defensive of it. It's just terrible, terrible politics to tell people from on-high that they speak incorrectly.

Getting back to the article linked at the top of this section, they had a conversation about it on Political Gabfest, and Emily Bazelon said she found it surprising that Trump had gained ground with nonwhite voters, because he does so many racist things. I think this provides another example of what I mean about highly-educated, affluent liberals speaking in a way that other people don't really get. To the type of people who work on (and listen to) Slate podcasts, the term racism is used by default to refer to systemic racism. By this definition, a racist is somebody who contributes to -- or perhaps just doesn't actively oppose -- social systems that produce disparate outcomes between racial groups. So, you can be a racist without holding any animus toward nonwhite people. This has so become the working meaning of racism among this circle (my circle) that we use it this way without even really thinking about it.

But I don't think this is the case for most people outside the Slate-podcast demographic. To them, the term racism refers to interpersonal racism. So, racists are people who actively discriminate against or disparage other people based on their skin color -- bosses who pass over people of color for promotions, sports fans who chant racial slurs at the opposing team, people who hang out on Neo-Nazi websites.

By the former definition, Trump does and says a lot of racist things; by the latter definition, it's not so cut-and-dried. For his many faults, he doesn't disparage people explicitly because of their skin color, and he's so all-over-the-place-all-the-time with his rhetoric that people can take from it almost anything they wish. (For example, tweeting “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” immediately followed by "Honor the memory of George Floyd!") He is very consistently anti-immigration and "tough on crime," but such positions seem to not be as disliked by nonwhite voters as I once thought -- perhaps because they're the ones who feel the most threatened, job-wise, by immigrants, and the ones most likely to live in neighborhoods in which violent crime is a big problem. (And I'm not making any value claims here; I'm just calling it as I see it.)

I think a lot of nonwhite people -- not a majority, but not a tiny sliver either -- see Trump working with Ice Cube and supporting Herschel Walker and receiving endorsements from Jim Brown and Geraldo Rivera and ostentatiously praising Black people ("Look at my African-American over here!") and tweeting how much he loves Mexican people while eating a taco salad, and they don't hate it. It kinda works, and a big part of why it works is that the messaging from the other side doesn't speak to such people anymore at all. Plus, liberals can also be very cringe on race, including the man at the top of the ticket.

Moralists vs. Pragmatists

I could be completely wrong about everything I wrote above. The only thing I believe with certainty when it comes to political analysis is that nobody can say anything with certainty. It doesn't mean it's all useless; it just means if you're trying to honestly assess things, you should always keep an open about changing your prior beliefs. One thing that I'm trying very hard not to do in this entry is commit the "the smart things to do politically are the things I like" fallacy. In a vacuum, I don't have super strong feelings on a lot of the issues I discuss above. The main thing I want politically at this moment is for Democrats to win elections -- or more specifically for Trump-supporting Republicans to lose elections (which, given the current state of affairs, is pretty much the same thing). So, for the most part, what I consider good policy and good messaging are what achieves this end. That is to say, I'm a pragmatist.

And this brings me to the linked article above entitled "The Two Kinds of Progressives: Moralists vs. Pragmatists" by Matthew Yglesias. I found it quite interesting, in no small part because, as an avowed pragmatist, I often experience the tension described in the article first-hand. In the past decade or so, I've really come to embrace the idea that politics (life, really) is a series of imperfect compromises. Nothing we do is totally right or totally wrong. Pretty much everything we do hurts some people, at least a little bit, and helps other people, at least a little bit. So, being a good person boils down to negotiating a never-ending stream of impossible decisions in a way that best serves society overall.    

Now, "best" obviously is a super vague, subjective term that can mean a million different things to a million different people. But I don't think that that's what's at the heart of the moralist-pragmatist divide. It's not the "best" part that's so divisive; it's the "negotiating" part. Moralists believe there are things that are simply not to be negotiated. They have a collection of moral certitudes that we pragmatists lack, and these certitudes form the basis of their political positions. If you want to summarize things with a pithy pseudo-cliché: For the moralist, the heart informs the head; for the pragmatist, the head informs the heart. And sometimes those inverted ways of thinking can come into conflict, even when the end goal is basically the same.

Anyway, I could probably write a couple thousand more words on this topic, but this entry is already quite long, and I want to hit one more thing. Actually, I'm going to post this now and save my next topic for its own standalone entry.

Until next time...

Entry 679: An Entry About Future Entries

Short entry this week. I bit off more than I could chew. I set out to do a political/social-commentary post, because I haven't done one of those in a while, and I don't want this blog to just be about petty arguments I have with my children, but I couldn't finish it. So, it's just sitting there in my Blogger feed, demarcated with the sign of procrastination: (Draft). Hopefully I'll be able to finish it sometime over the next week. It's getting big, too. I might have to break it up into multiple entries.

And it actually wasn't procrastination on my part. S left this morning for a week abroad for work, so I've had the kids to myself all day. I had to take Lil' S2 to flag football this afternoon (an extremely unfun 0-35 defeat), and then his two friends who live up the street came over, and it's basically impossible to do anything that takes concentration (or doesn't) when they're around. And today was especially bad because the weather wasn't great, so they were inside most the time. It was like a Family Circus cartoon: The house is a wreck, kids are bouncing around everywhere, you can see rain through the window, and an exacerbated mom (dad in this case) is telling somebody off-panel, "Yes, conditions are still terrible, and it's really bad outside, too!"

I'm glad they came over, though, because he spends a lot of time over at their house, and so I like to give their parents a break once in a while. I mean, they always say they don't mind, and that it's actually easier when he comes over, because then the kids are occupied and not nagging them constantly. I'm sure that's true, but I'm also sure it's true that they like having some time with no kids at all at their house.

Until next time...

Entry 678: Petty Standoff Edition

Coming in to this post a little grumpy. I just got into one of those parent-child standoffs with Lil' S1, where, as the parent, you don't even really care about the thing you are standing off over, but you've already said no, repeatedly, so if you back down, it would signify great weakness on your part, and your child would never respect you ever again... or at least that's how it feels in the heat of the moment.

Here's what happened this time. It was about 9:25 pm, right around the time everybody goes to sleep in our house but me. Usually I'll let Lil' S1 stay up a little later and read in bed, but not too late, because he has to wake up pretty early for school now. So, I told him he could read until 9:35, but he had to watch the time himself and turn out the lights and go to sleep on his own. (No pulling the "you didn't tell me..." stunt when I come to see why the lights are still on a half-hour later.) He agreed but said he had to find his phone first to see the time. I told him I'd ping it, but he said it wouldn't work because it's dead.

This really annoyed me. It's one thing to misplace your phone -- it happens frequently to almost everybody with a phone -- but letting die is another thing. There's no reason your phone should die in your house within ten yards of a charger. He was just lazy and didn't want to get up to charge it when he noticed it was low on power. I've told him many times: Charge your phone; you have it for emergencies, and it won't do you any good if it's dead. But of course he's only 11, so messages from his nagging father don't always sink it.

Anyway, now, instead of something that should take fifteen seconds -- pinging your phone and grabbing it -- takes fifteen minutes. We search all over the house for it. S wakes up because she hears the commotion, and now she's super annoyed. (For some reason, I always bear the brunt of her annoyance in such a situation instead of the person who actually caused the whole kerufffle in the first place.) We're all looking peevishly, and finally he finds it between some cushions. Good.

It's about 9:45 at this point, and he plugs in his phone, gets in bed, and starts reading. I let it go until 9:50 and then tell him it's light out. He asks for ten more minutes. I say no. He asks for five more. I say no. He asks for three more. I say no. Part of it is that I'm still annoyed; part of it is that it's just time for him to go bed; part of it is that not getting to read as late as you want feels like a good low stakes consequence for letting your phone die and then losing it. But he just won't let it go, and he keeps pushing and pushing and pushing until I'm threatening to take away his Nintendo.* S gets up again and comes in (she's more on my side this time), and it's another three minutes of protestation until he half-relents, and we turn off his lights and leave.

So, it's over and done with now, but it's like... why? I'm mean I know why -- he's 11 -- but still.

*He just bought a 3DS for some reason. He already has a Switch and a PS5. I almost forbade him from getting another video game system. But he had birthday money from his grandparents, and that's what he wanted to spend it on, so... whatever.

By the way, I don't want to give the wrong impression on this blog. Last week I wrote about another annoying incident with Lil' S1, but I don't want you to think that we have some sort of persistent problem with him. We don't. He's a great kid overall, and he seems to be really thriving at his new school. It just so happens that, in each case, at the moment I sat down to crank out an entry that's what was on my mind. If I was writing this tomorrow, there's a good chance I wouldn't have even mentioned anything about Lil' S1's lost phone, because I probably (hopefully) won't even be thinking about it tomorrow.

That's the thing about this blog. It's about my life, in so much as my life can be accurately captured by the thing that I'd thinking at the moment I happen to have an hour of spare time to write. So, it's probably only about a little bit of my life. But I guess that's fine. 

Alright it's late here, so let's hit a few bullets and call it a post.

• I went to a birthday party last night for a trivia buddy. It was a surprise party, in which the honoree was actually surprised. I don't think I've ever been to such a party before. At every surprise party I've been to before, they're always like I knew something was up.
  
  
• Speaking of parties, we are throwing one for Lil' S2 tomorrow since we spent his actual birthday this year recovering from our harrowing trip to Maui. It's at Dave & Buster's, and god I hate that place. I so wanted him to chose a different venue, but all his friends had parties there, and often when you're that age you just want to do what your friends did.
  
  
• My neck is super sore. They started up wrestling class again at my Krav Maga gym, so I went on Wednesday, and I worked muscles I typically don't work. It's a common joke among the "older" folk at my gym to say, "I'm too old for this shit." But, for the first time in my life, I'm actually starting to feel that way. Even just a few years ago, I was super excited for wrestling class and smoking fools on the mat, and it's now like: Ugh... am I really going to roll around for an hour in physical combat with somebody 15 years younger than me? The answer is still yes, but it's a much less enthusiastic yes than before.
  
  
• We've been watching The Bear. I really like it. S really doesn't like it. I think we're at the point where we just have to shake hands, say we tried, and go our separate ways on this one. It's for the best. I can watch it one my own schedule, and S can fast-forward to the end, so that she knows what happens without actually having to watch it.
  
  
• We've had deer hanging out in our yard the past few Saturday mornings (maybe other mornings, too; we don't really look during the week). I wonder if they'll be back tomorrow.
   
  
  
  

Until next time...

Entry 677: Shots, Shots, Shots, Shots, Shots

One week of middle school in the books for Lil' S1, and he seems to be doing well with it. The only snag of the week came Friday morning, and it didn't have anything directly to do with school. I took him to the pediatrician to get some shots and blood drawn, and it was a minor fiasco. I was apprehensive coming into it because he has a well-established aversion to shots. He will be completely chill -- just a normal kid -- and then the second he sees the needle come out, he has a total freakout. I can't do it! I can't do it! I can't do it! A few years ago, when he had to get some boosters, I had to literally pin his arms back, straight-jacket style, so that the doc could give him his jabs.

But he's older now, so I thought optimistically: Surely it won't be as bad this time. And it wasn't. But it wasn't good neither. He still had a little panic attack and was physically fighting to get away from the doctor. I grabbed him, but he's much bigger now than he was three years ago (it's like wrestling a Doberman Pinscher), and so it was a challenge to restrain him. Thankfully, the doctor is one of those no-nonsense ladies -- a total professional -- and she just went jab, reload, jab, reload, jab, done, like she was John Wick surrounded by Russian gangsters. It was impressive.

Unfortunately, however, that was only Part 1. He also had to get a couple vials of blood drawn for blood work, and that is not just a quick prick. You have to be still and let the doctor find a good vein and then sit there with a tube in your arm for a minute or two. The doctor was so discouraged by his behavior during shots (everybody has their limit) that she suggested we bring him back another time. But I was like: Fuck that! I am NOT coming back. We are doing this now! I don't care if I have to psychically pin him down in a way that will traumatize him for the next twenty years. I'll pay for the therapy. And I expressed this sentiment, worded in a much less psychopathic manner.

So, the doc set up the blood-drawing station, preparing for the worst, but weirdly he just sat there and didn't fuss at all, even when the needle went into his vein. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was a very pleasant surprise. Although, that's kinda Lil' S1's way. Something "big" will happen -- he'll have a meltdown or fight with his brother or get in trouble with S or me -- and he'll be at DEFCON 1, and then five minutes later he's totally chill, acting like nothing ever happened. I don't know if he's actually moved on or if it's a defense mechanism or what. And he's not very forthcoming when I ask him about such things. We had a conversation something like the following later in the evening.

Me: Why were you freaking out so much at the doctor's office? You can't act like that anymore. You're past that age.

Lil' S1: I just hate shots.

Me: I know, they suck, but you got your blood drawn without freaking out, and that's a way bigger needle and it stays in you for like a minute. Shots are over in two seconds, and they don't really hurt.

Lil' S1: They do hurt!

Me: Not really.

Lil' S1: They do to me! You can't get in my head and feel what I feel.

[Lil' S2 overhears our conversation and joins in, sensing an opportunity to get one over on his brother.]

Lil' S2: Did you cry when you got your shots?

Lil' S1: Yeah, I cried.

Lil' S2: I didn't cry when I got mine and they hurt me just as bad.

Lil' S1: So.

Lil' S2: So, I'm almost three years younger than you, and I didn't cry.

Me: Yeah, why do you, the older brother, freak out when your younger brother doesn't? Isn't that embarrassing for you?

Lil' S1: No, I don't care. And I'm not Lil' S2. Don't you always say that I should be myself?

Me: Yes, good point.... Let me put it this way: I'm glad that it doesn't bother you -- I like it when you are yourself -- but I still wish that you wouldn't freak out every time you have to get a shot.

Lil' S1: I know. I just hate shots.

Me: I understand that. But they're part of living a healthy life. That's how you get vaccinated. I mean, would you rather have a tiny bit of pain from a shot or the pain from a disease that's twenty times worse?

Lil' S2: Not twenty times, like, twenty-thousand times. 

---------------------------------------

In other news, we went to see Blue Beetle last night. I went in not knowing anything about it. I didn't even know it was a superhero movie (although I probably should have inferred as much from the title), and I was kinda disappointed once I realized as much. I'm tired of seeing the same thing over and over when I go to the theater. And this was very much the same thing: evil-doer introduced and seeds of evil scheme sown in opening scene; next we meet our young, conventionally attractive, but kinda awkward, protagonist; he or she (usually he) has a wisecracking sidekick; protagonist chances into meeting with love interest; protagonist somehow get superpowers they don't want and try to get rid of (there's often a scene of uncontrollable superpower high-jinks); superpowers cause problems and make protagonist sad; protagonist reluctantly becomes hero, in a scene in which they use their super powers accidentally or unwittingly to save the day; protagonist gets involved with an evil-doer, usually by way of a love interest somehow related to said evil-doer; protagonist and love interest have a moment in which they are about to kiss but it gets interrupted; protagonist suffers big loss (often death of a loved one) at hands of evil-doer; expository scene in which evil-doers scheme is fully explained to audience members who haven't picked up on it yet; protagonist has self-reflecting moment (often containing flashbacks); protagonist sets out to stop evil-doer from doing evil; protagonist is aided by acquaintance who happens to be amazing inventor/computer programmer/all-around technology whiz; protagonist and team journey to evil-doer, perhaps through some sort of portal to another dimension; protagonist and team defeat henchmen and breach evil-doer's fortress; protagonist gets separated from team and has long final battle with evil-doer that they win but only with help from re-emergent love interest, wise-cracking sidekick, random character you thought was too weak/scared/inept to help, mistreated henchman who finally turns against the evil-doer, and dead loved one (often via mystical inspiration); flash forward to final scene where all previous destruction from evil-doer is reconciled, the protagonist and love interest finally kiss, and ride off into the sunset, and the sidekick makes one heartfelt remark followed by last wisecrack; credits roll and then there is a bonus scene setting up the next movie in the series. 

That's it. That's almost every movie that comes out now.

But with all that said, this movie isn't totally devoid of entertaining moments. It has some good performances and those can often carry the day even in super formulaic movies. Xolo Maridueña is super charismatic (Miguel Diaz! Cobra Kai!); George Lopez is pretty funny; and Susan Sarandon is always one of my faves. Plus, we took the kids, and they all seemed to like it (five kids total because we went with another family), so that's good. I'm at the stage in parenting where movie-going isn't about me. And the sad part is once my kids are old enough to see the movies in the theater that I want to see, they probably won't want to hang out with me.

Or, even worse, there won't even be any movies in theaters I want to see. We seem to be trending that way now (and the SAG-AFTRA strike surely only exacerbates the issue). I'm trying to think of the last really good movie I saw in the theater. Air was decent -- an enjoyable throwback to the type of movie I'd see at the mall with a friend in 1992 -- but I wouldn't say it was really good. To find a film with that designation, I think you have to go back to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and that was four years ago! Streaming and prestige television are wonderful innovations, but they can't replace the theater experience. I hope we have an "actually good films that play in the theater for longer than a week" renaissance in the near future. Although, I heard both Oppenheimer and Barbie were good, and I haven't made much effort to see either, so maybe I'm the problem. That's always a possibility.

Until next time... 

[Apropos of nothing, here's a model bicycle Lil' S1 made with his 3D-printer pen. He's getting pretty good with that thing.]