​By Meg Langford


(Pickford Studios was overwhelmed with your response to our April Fool's Day blog about that person who makes being a fool not just a one day event, but an ongoing affair. As we are currently being frequently ghost-banned by Facebook, these amazing Page View stats really encouraged us. Given the Facebook ban, we had been seriously considering giving up on the blog entirely. It can be very discouraging, especially given that we want to keep this blog ad free, and it is not a monetized project. We just wish to be part of the conversation, but not in the painfully ridiculous Pepsi ad sort of way ... So please note that your support, and sharing our stories with you friends and colleagues, means everything to us.  (Please find the April Fool's Trump article just below this Ruby Bridges/Betsy DeVos story.) As for the following blog: We apologize for posting this story some six weeks after the story broke. Pickford Studios is in the middle of a sad senior citizen crisis, and, as always, family comes first. Nonetheless, we suggest that this story remains as relevant and timely as ever. Mocking the bravery of a small child is never appropriate, and demanding accountability from those who engage in the mocking has no expiration date.)



​
THE FAKE MCCOY




Here's the deal:  when you are trying to convince people to become a vegetarian, a good argument to NOT make is, "after all, Hitler was a vegetarian." Was Hitler a vegetarian?  Absolutely.   But is this a compelling argument when you are trying to get people to forego the joys of bacon, prize winning barbecue, and juicy quarter pounders?  No.  Because none of us really want to think we have anything in common with Hitler.  (Although I must admit that, given the last few months, that statement now seems wildly inaccurate.)   My point is, all analogies, similes, and metaphors fall apart if scrutinized rigorously enough.  X.J. Kennedy put it best, in Ars Poetica:  "The goose that laid the golden egg died looking up its crotch to find out how its sphincter worked."


Cartoonist Glenn McCoy clearly missed out on this brief requisite college curriculum poem, so busy was he doodling in his textbooks, because if there is one thing that millions of people believe about Cartoonist Glenn McCoy this week, it is that he is walking around with his head stuck very far up his ass.


In case you have been afraid to leave your house or turn on the news this week (something which I sympathize with completely, by the way), McCoy is that jackass who heard about the D.C. school protest against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and decided to compare this event to hundreds of angry white people lining up for months so that they could all scream death threats at a six year old child.   I am referring, of course, to Ruby Bridges, a brave child who forged a turning point in desegregation history, and who was immortalized by Normal Rockwell in one of the most powerful works of his lifetime, "The Problem We All Live With".


I know that I am not the first blogger to write about this—the ghastly parodying of an iconic 

painting, which masterfully captures prejudice at its worst. But as I have iterated before, sometimes it is important to be part of the chorus. 


So dear Glenn.   Let's consider the rest of this article to be AN OPEN LETTER TO GLENN MCCOY.  Let's start with all the ways that the protest situation against DeVos bears no resemblance to the Ruby Bridges drama.


1.)  The protesters in the DeVos situation did precisely what it was their right to do.  They protested.  They did not even break the law-- only one protester was arrested, and that was not for anything directly connected to DeVos.  They did not threaten her, they did not assault her.  In the case of Ruby Bridges, the protesters threw objects at her, and threatened her with death.  Not only is this quite illegal, but it is an an insult to any true Christian, particularly given the mob's choice to invoke God in the same phrase that they threatened the “nigger”.


2.) The protesters in the DeVos situation made their point and then let it go.  Once she decided not to go in that entrance, they did not follow her or escalate the situation.  They even told one of their own who had decided to stand in front of DeVos's vehicle to just let it pass.  The protesters in the Ruby Bridges did unthinkable things to that child, like placing a negro baby doll in a coffin and thrusting it in Ruby’s face. They also threatened, on a daily basis, to poison her. 


3.) The DeVos protesters were done with their business in a couple of hours.  The Ruby Bridges protesters all removed their children from school, in violation of the law.  The teachers in Ruby Bridges' new school refused to come to school and do their jobs, in violation of the law.  There were only a couple of brave exceptions.  (The child of a white Methodist minister, specifically.) The lesser known school down the road, which was also being integrated by three black children, remained deserted of white students for two years. Not quite at all in any way, shape, or form akin to DeVos trying to walk in a school's side door. Look, Glenn--even the perennially un-“fair” and wildly un-“balanced” Fox News couldn't get any traction out of the ridiculous little DeVos dust-up.  And heaven knows, if there had been any serious misbehavior on the part of the protesters, don’t we all just know that Fox News would have made it sound like Attica and the ’68 riots all rolled into one? 


This is the best Fox News could come up with: Protesters initially blocked newly confirmed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from entering a Washington, D.C., school on Friday – with one “Black Lives Matter” demonstrator even briefly standing in front of her vehicle. DeVos later made it into Jefferson Middle School Academy in Southwest D.C. for her first visit as secretary to a public school. This was only after a teacher/parent “vigil” blocked the road by the front entrance, and a handful of Black Lives Matter protesters caused problems when DeVos tried to enter through the back entrance. Protesters shouted “shame, shame” at the secretary as she was led back into her vehicle. One holding a Black Lives Matter sign then stood in front of the van, but was scolded by fellow protesters to “let her leave,” and he stepped aside.


4.)  Betsy DeVos is a privileged, rich white woman who chose the public spotlight.  Ruby Bridges was a little six year old girl.  What the hell had she done that she should have to pass by large, looming crowds every morning of her life, her ears ringing with threats to lynch her?



5.) Betsy DeVos had worked systematically that very same week of the protest to lose the respect of the nation:  asked questions point blank by members of Congress, she stonewalled them, essentially "pleading the fifth" and disrespecting the entire process.  This was in addition to showing egregious lack of knowledge regarding some of the most basic crisis issues facing education today.   By contrast, Ruby Bridges was a little six year old girl, whose only desire was to go to school and learn something.  What the hell had she done to earn such hatred and to garner death threats from the ugly crowd?  Unless, of course, her sin was being born black. 


And here's what Glenn McCoy misses about the whole Betsy DeVos debacle.  Regarding the confirmation hearing in particular, she has not earned our respect.  In fact, she has gone out of her way to earn our deepest disrespect.


If she was as proud as she appears to be, she would have announced her views with confidence.  But she is not proud, she is haughty.  Arrogant, filled with hubris.


If she was so certain that she was right, she would have answered the questions put forth by a man who is Senator in Congress, and who has every right to have his questions answered, especially when he puts them in unmistakable, uber-clear Yes-or No terms.


If she was honest, she would not have equivocated.  But Betsy DeVos is not honest.  If she was, that honesty and any true collection of Christian values would prohibit her from working from a man like Donald Trump.


6.) Betsy Devos had a pretty damn sweet rest of the week, after the little dust-up at the school door. On Valentine’s Day, the President of the United States called her “a genius”, for the way she handled her confirmation hearing, which is odd to me since what I saw was her repeating the same answers over and over and over and over again, usually a symptom of some kind of mental tic. DeVos gave a little book report at the Magnet Schools of America 2017 National Policy Training Conference on February 15th. All these pleasant things happened to Devos after those mean protestors—maybe a couple dozen people holding signs, most of them teachers—said they didn’t want her around their school. Oh, and she also told Axios Media in an interview that, regarding the federal government’s role in education, she said “it would be fine with me to have myself worked out of a job.” The Ruby Bridges family, by contrast, was harassed with death threats, banned from shopping in their local grocery store, and Ruby’s father was fired from his job. And as if that wasn’t enough, way over in Mississippi (the Ruby incident took place in New Orleans), Ruby’s grandparents were forced off of their land and rendered homeless. See, Glenn?—another way there is really no comparison. 


Last but not least, let me say that you, Mr. McCoy, have no business associating yourself in any way, shape, or form, with either Ruby Bridges or Norman Rockwell. We’ve looked at Ruby’s sacrifice; let’s take a look at the man who painted the iconic Ruby Bridges moment in history.


Norman Rockwell took a mighty big chance and an unquantifiable risk when he switched from painting snippets of a perfect, jolly, sweet, and distinctly white America (it was the policy at 

Saturday Evening Post that Negros only be painted in servile positions), to capturing a grimmer side of the great experiment called “America.”  Overnight, with the publication of Ruby's painting, "The Problem We All Live With", his work went from “tugging at our heartstrings” to “ripped from the headlines”. And the results were exactly what one might have expected.  Although many found an even deeper level of respect for the man, and Rockwell was vaulted into the realm of more serious artists (no longer "just an illustrator"--the same thing those Parisian Fous said about Toulouse Lautrec, only in French). Still, as we might expect, Rockwell received bags full of hate mail.  Heretofore, Rockwell had painted on such controversial themes as the passion of politics  (yeah, right, "Elect Casey", some portraying some old white fart politician, and "Election Day", in which no people except the whitest of white are voting), and crime (yeah right  "Crime Doesn't Pay" featuring a hobo stealing a pie, or "No Swimming", in which some kids dash half naked from a swimming hole to dodge a trespassing charge) ...but seriously, Rockwell had only dealt with the happy, sappy side of America.  He had done it brilliantly, and he had forayed into some less sunshiny themes with works like "The Four Freedoms."  But clearly, a combination of life (the decades passing, and American fomenting) and a persuasive wife of three decades, nudged Rockwell to finally take on some politically charged themes.


I admit, I am partial.  I had been lost in the torturous, tortuous story of the murder of the three Civil Rights workers back in 1964--it is a story so circumlocutous that the mastermind behind the murders was actually retried again in 2005, four decades later. (!)  His name is Ray Killen, he was born in 1925, and I am thrilled to report that, in spite of his dopey appeals, he is still rotting away in prison as I write this.  Sentenced to life, because he needed to bludgeon and then gun down three young men whose worst crime was to come to Mississippi to sign up blacks to vote.  But long before Ray Killen faced his final justice, a bold, brave "new" Norman Rockwell make a sharp turn away from his playful portraying of white America, and rendered the tragedy in what is surely the most haunting painting he has ever created: "Southern Justice​". 


And hey Glenn, it’s not that Rockwell is off limits.  But let his voice, and his vision, echo from the past into the present, as this artist did, when Norman Rockwell's iconic "Runaway" became "The Militarization of Officer Joe."

Glenn, Glenn, Glenn.  You went for the cheap shot, and now, you have legions of new anti-fans.   You saw some slight female trying to get into school and thought, "Hey, let's compare this billionairess to a scared little black girl in the mid 1900's south." You could have thought it through, you could have chucked the idea, seeing it to be tasteless.  But, as Sam McPheeters of Vice Magazine so pithily put it, regarding Glenn McCoy's impulse control:  "he just couldn’t help himself, any more than the shuffling sewer monsters can help snatching a stray puppy and sucking it down a storm drain."


Oh yeah.  Tell 'em, Sam. 


And Glenn, as for your pathetically lame excuse (as in, if it was a horse that badly lame, we'd take it behind the back of the barn and shoot it), you said, in response to the viral and international furor: "I regret if anyone was offended by my choice of metaphors, but my 

intention was to focus on the protesters being hateful and to open up a dialogue on this point."  


Well, I'd like to reprint here a comment made by a forum poster known as "charliee, regarding your desire, Glenn, to "open up dialogue”.  Quips charliee:


“If McCoy wants a dialogue, I'll start: Glenn McCoy, it appears that you're an insensitive, ignorant, racist.”


But here's the thing, Glenn.  I have been to your page.  It is myopic, full of cheap shots, shows little signs of artistic evolution, and is frankly not that funny.   So since your insincere apology for the Ruby Bridges debacle amounted basically to a thinly veiled "Fuck You," Let me put this whole Ruby Bridges thing into terms you can understand.


Your daughter--Molly, isn't it?  Fifteen, last I read?   Molly is fifteen, and in this made up scenario (designed to jolt you into some degree of human sensitivity), she has gotten herself pregnant—or perhaps worse, raped by some deranged maniac. Because she is the daughter of a conservative, the secret has slipped out that she in on her way to get an abortion and what a hypocrisy.  On her way to the clinic, hundreds of conservative evangelicals line up along the sidewalk and scream the most hideous things: she will burn in hell, they will kill her (speeding along the burning in hell scenario), and all the while, they throw baby body parts at her, along with liberal amounts of blood.   She is terrified.  This will scar her for life.


Now Glenn.  Are you picturing all that?   You're a really funny guy, right?  Let's get a laugh riot side splitting cartoon out of it.  I dare you. 


Post Script:   The only interesting thing about you, Glenn, (and man, I did not see this coming), is that you were involved with the creation of The Minions.  Dear Readers:  Yes, those minions.  So here is a note to anybody reading this who has a little time and a lot of anger and a burning, raging, fire in their belly--Why don't you cruise over to Glenn, Glenn, Glenn.  You went for the cheap shot, and now, you have legions of new anti-fans.   You saw some slight female trying to get into school and though, "Hey, let's compare this billionairess to a scared little black girl in the mid 1900's south." You could have thought it through, you could have chucked the idea, seeing it to be tasteless.  But, as Sam McPheeters of Vice Magazine so pithily put it, regarding Glenn McCoy's impulse control:  "he just couldn’t help himself, any more than the shuffling sewer monsters can help snatching a stray puppy and sucking it down a storm drain."


Oh yeah.  Tell 'em, Sam. 


And Glenn, as for your pathetically lame excuse (as in, if it was a horse that badly lame, we'd take it behind the back of the barn and shoot it), you said, in response to the viral and international furor: "I regret if anyone was offended by my choice of metaphors, but my 

intention was to focus on the protesters being hateful and to open up a dialogue on this point."  


Well, I'd like to reprint here a comment made by a forum poster known as "charliee, regarding your desire, Glenn, to "open up dialogue”.  Quips charliee:


“If McCoy wants a dialogue, I'll start: Glenn McCoy, it appears that you're an insensitive, ignorant, racist.”


But here's the thing, Glenn.  I have been to your page.  It is myopic, full of cheap shots, shows little signs of artistic evolution, and is frankly not that funny.   So since your insincere apology for the Ruby Bridges debacle amounted basically to a thinly veiled "Fuck You," Let me put this whole Ruby Bridges thing into terms you can understand.


Your daughter--Molly, isn't it?  Fifteen, last I read?   Molly is fifteen, and in this made up scenario (designed to jolt you into some degree of human sensitivity), she has gotten herself pregnant—or perhaps worse, raped by some deranged maniac. Because she is the daughter of a conservative, the secret has slipped out that she in on her way to get an abortion and what a hypocrisy.  On her way to the clinic, hundreds of conservative evangelicals line up along the sidewalk and scream the most hideous things: she will burn in hell, they will kill her (speeding along the burning in hell scenario), and all the while, they throw baby body parts at her, along with liberal amounts of blood.   She is terrified.  This will scar her for life.


Now Glenn.  Are you picturing all that?   You're a really funny guy, right?  Let's get a laugh riot side splitting cartoon out of it.  I dare you. 


Post Script:   The only interesting thing about you, Glenn, (and man, I did not see this coming), is that you were involved with the creation of The Minions.  Dear Readers:  Yes, those minions.  So here is a note to anybody reading this who has a little time and a lot of anger and a burning, raging, fire in their belly--Why don't you cruise over to change.org and start a petition for Disney to drop Glenn McCoy, or else.  Sheesh, he's the only one who can draw a canary yellow suppository? 
​ and start a petition for Disney to drop Glenn McCoy, or else.  Sheesh, he's the only one who can draw a canary yellow suppository? 

                                     ADDENDUM:   A Doctor Learns from his Patient

During this hellacious year, a curious young psychiatrist by the name of Robert Coles (now an 87 year old Harvard Emeritus professor) saw the Ruby Bridges story on television, and become obsessed with the notion of doing whatever he could to help this poor child.  He was in for the surprise of a lifetime.   It was the doctor who would end up learning life-changing lessons from this little child.  Below is the transcript of his interview, including his interviews with Ruby.   I think you will find that the story below (and video, from YouTube), will provide you with profound spiritual inspiration, at a time when we all desperately need it.

​ROBERT COLES TRANSCRIPTS:

New Orleans was aflame with racial hate and street violence.  They were trying to desegregate two elementary schools. And this little girl was ordered by a federal judge to go into one of them.  And she was there all by herself.  The whole white population had boycotted the school.  No other children with her.  And I happened to see this little child going into a school in New Orleans, at the age of six, to the first grade.

I thought to myself,  "I would like to know that child. I would like to know what's happening to her.” 

One day, having spent months getting to know ruby, and being rather puzzled about how normal and stoic and strong she was, going through this kind of living hell--200 people waiting at 8:30 in the morning to tell her they were going to kill her, 200 people in the afternoon telling her they were going to kill her ...25 federal marshals taking her into that building.  What would you expect? You would expect that a child going through that would start to develop symptoms, and being in trouble. . .

I waited and waited, and there weren't any symptoms.  And she kept going and learning, and being the Ruby that she was, a normal six year old black child.  Very poor background, parents didn't even know how to read and write.  Humble people.  One day her school teacher said to me, she had been leaning out of the window, and she saw Ruby yet again coming to school.  This time she watched carefully ,and she noticed, that as Ruby was walking past this mob of heckling men and women, she stopped.  And her teacher saw her lips moving.  

I said ""Ruby, your teacher told me today that you were talking to those people in the street."  

She said to me, “Doctor, I told her that I wasn't talking to the people."


"Well who were you talking to, Ruby?”  

"I told her.  I was talking to God."


(INTERVIEW CUTS TO FOOTAGE OF THE PROTESTORS, BEING INTERVIEW BY THE NEWS:
REPORTER:  WOULD YOU TELL OUR AUDIENCE WHY YOU TOOK THEM OUT? 
WOMAN:  BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT THEM TO GO TO SCHOOL WITH THE NIGGERS!)


“Why were you praying to God?  

She said “I was praying for the people in the street.”

And I said, “Why were you doing that, Ruby?"  

And she said, “Well because, I wanted to pray for them.”

I said “Ruby, why would you want to pray for those people?"  

And she looked at me, her eyes wide, and she said "Well don't you think they need praying for?"

That stopped me cold.  

“Where did you get that idea, Ruby?"

"Well, my mommy and daddy have told me that.  And the minister told me that in church."

She said “I pray for them every morning, and I pray for them every afternoon when I go home.”

(DOCUMENTARY CUTS BACK TO A RANTING PROTESTOR:
WOMAN:  I SAY FOR THE MOTHERS TO KEEP THEIR KIDS OUT OF SCHOOL!  ALL TOGETHER!  WE’RE WHITE PEOPLE!  WE DON’T WANT THEM TO GO TO SCHOOL WITH NIGGERS!   I HAVE FIVE, AND THEY AIN'T GOING TO SCHOOL WITH NO NIGGERS!)

But I said, "Ruby, those people are so mean to you.  So nasty to you.  You must have some other feelings besides wanting to pray for them?"

She said,  “I just keep praying for them I just hope that God will be good to them.”

I said “What do you say in the prayer, Ruby?”

"I always say the same thing."

"What's that, Ruby?" 

"I  always say ‘Please, dear God, forgive them, because they don't know what they're doing.’ ”

Now I'd heard that someplace before.  And I heard it in that kitchen, in the extremely impoverished house, and it silenced me.  I had no more questions to ask.   Here was a child, who we learned in the sixties to say that she came from a "culturally disadvantaged house" and a "culturally deprived home"...they were illiterate, her parents, and yet they had taught her Biblical truths , in a way that she was to  live them out.  I'd like to see some of us with fancy education bring up our children similarly.  Do we?  I am not so sure we do...
​

By the Pickford Studios Crew

                                                            
​Pickford Studios is proud to announce that as a result of turning our staff into a 'round the clock, 24 hour crew, along with a special deal we have cut with Reuters and the A.P., we now have FIRST ACCESS to all breaking news stories coming across the wire.  Because of our astonishing site stats in our 18 month old blog, and our formation of a groundbreaking new journalism juggernaut--B.J.T.C.  (Better Journalism Through Caffeine), we will now be able to offer more than just blogging and punditry ...we will actually be bringing you breaking news the very nanosecond that it happens!



BREAKING NEWS:


TRUMP COMES UP WITH GENIUS IDEA TO WIPE OUT NATION'S 587 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT.

Trump has United States declare Bankruptcy!   

"This is my seventh bankruptcy, people, and everybody knows that Seven is a lucky number.  And who would know lucky numbers better than me, a hyuge casino owner."


UPDATE:  In a bizarre turn of events, involving some incredibly bad luck for President Trump, the bankruptcy proceedings were overseen by a judge whom Trump had dealt with before.   The Honorable A'isha Intizara Maria Hernandez--who is of Muslim/Latino extraction, and who is married to the famous black PGA champion Lyon Forrest--was the woman on the bench who would be deciding The President's fate.  Judge Hernandez's parents are Ms. Fatima Fez, who is the former Deputy Chairman for Management and Budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, and Mr. David Hernandez, who is the Executive Director of Corporate Engagement for Meals on Wheels America.






Ironically, Trump’s former dealings with this judge involved a lawsuit that actually originated right here out of Pickford Studios.  When Trump was still a private (well, depends on how you define “private”) citizen, he attempted to claim patent and trademark rights for “Mexifornia: The Board Game” which was actually created by The Pickford Word’s own Mickey McClain.  (See moviesforyourmind.net, under HOME, under AUTHORS for Mickey’s bio.)  Similar in appearance to “Monopoly”, “Mexifornia: The Board Game” consists of a colorful board , two stacks of cards, elaborate rules of play, and some really cool game pieces.  The game lets players determine whether immigrants are a blight or a boon, whether white Americans are bigots exploiting the workers, or just good old patriots wishing to enforce the rules of law and keep our borders safe.  It was Trump’s intention to claim ownership and turn the game into a new reality show, but the litigation drags on, leaving the outcome in limbo.   Mr. McClain also claims that Trump’s new theme park (TrumpLand!) has stolen Mickey’s travelling road show idea for the Gigantic Bobblehead Doll & Pez Dispenser Competition.  (In a separate lawsuit, Mickey McClain is being sued by the Pez Candy Company.  Mr. McClain is currently attempting to crowdfund his defense.)

In what some have criticized as an act of legislating from the bench, Judge Hernandez refused President Trump’s request for a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy filing on behalf of the United States of America, and instead Hernandez declared that Trump would have to declare both Chapter 11 and Chapter 7, given that just last week, Trump snuck an executive order under the radar, lost in the kerfuffle about Nunes and Flynn, as well as the two new executive orders regarding trade.  The Judge was referring to Executive Order 13782.5, in which Trump declared that the title of "President of the United States of America” be amended to read "President-Kingish Emperorus Maximus Trump."   Hernandez declared the executive order to be yet a further power grab from the most powerful man in the world, and that in attempting to blend his personal and professional identities, Trump had opened himself up to the unprecedented joining of the Chapters 7 and 11 bankruptcies.

As such, the draconian rules regarding the seizure of personal assets by the court and by creditors immediately applied to Donald Trump.

It was noted that Trump flipped Hernandez The Bird upon hearing this.

The White House, Mar-a-Lago, and Trump Towers have all been taken from The Donald, with the Judge declaring that Trump shall serve out the remainder of his presidency in the Mar-a-Lago groundskeeper hut.

Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood have both offered up their properties as the potential "next" White House, for “46”, Redford offering up his breathtaking Apsen A Frame, while Dirty Harry can see the President living in his Malibu digs.

Because Trump's wardrobe goes wildly over the limit of allowable assets, the Judge allowed him to select three suits, and three ties.  Trump selected three black suits and three red ties.

The Judge also allowed Donald Trump to keep some tools and a tool box that had been handed down to him by his grandfather, stating that "Trump could use them to learn what it meant to really do some actual work."   Anderson Cooper, reporting from inside the courthouse, stated that "Trump picked up, each in turn, a hammer, a screwdriver, a pliers, studying them with simian-like befuddlement reminiscent of the infamous black monolith scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, apparently having no idea what they were for”.

Because President Trump "mistakenly" declared his wife "an asset", Judge Hernandez declared them "instantaneously divorced" with one swift THWACK of her gavel.   Melania was last seen skipping gleefully down the courthouse steps with her son Barron. She then got into an idling Uber vehicle, driven by a one Travis Kalanick.   The three quickly sped away, and eyewitnesses reported seeing Melania cackling wildly inside the vehicle.

Trump was also ordered to surrender his entire fleet of vehicles, and was given a choice of just three to pick from, for his personal and Presidential use:  

1.  A Corbin Sparrow he received as a gift from the factory workers when he visited Myers Motors in Tallmadge, Ohio, for a big Trump Rally.  In a separate lawsuit, Trump is still dealing with the fallout from accepting such a large (well, relatively speaking) gift while acting in his role as President of the United States.  Trump's lawyers have countered that the President was actually campaigning for 2020 during the rally, and as such, was functioning as a candidate, not The President, and as such had a right to accept said Sparrow.  

2.  His personal limousine.  But there is a hitch:  the Judge declared that if Trump was to select this as the single personal vehicle that he is allowed to keep after bankruptcy, it is under the condition that he actually act as chauffeur, learning what it is like to make an honest living.  

3.  At this point, the Pickford Crew had trouble with their fax machine, and the listing for the third vehicle from which Trump had to choose came across the wires as merely the cryptic words........”Go F art!"

Back at the courthouse, the bankruptcy proceedings were over in a record breaking seventeen minutes, and Trump left with a big smile on his face, declaring to reporters that it had all gone exactly as he had planned, and that he had "WON BIGLY!"    He then got into his golf cart, and rode away, his combover riding the wind, creating its own little border wall between his big brain, and the vastness of our universe.

Daniel Pearlman, shown from left with his new bride Mariane, and in captivity before his beheading.

By Meg Langford

Here at Pickford Studios, we frequently choose not to blog on a subject—not because we don’t feel strongly about it—but rather because so many people are writing so much, and so well.  (Just as others are blogging badly.)  So we choose to stay out of the cyber-cacophony.

But we here at Pickford Studios did our stint in the world of education, and we have some strong opinions on the subject.   Ms. DeVos elicits a very visceral reaction, here at The Studios.  But rather than say about her what so many have said so powerfully, we have decided to take a look at an educational institution which is, apparently, all that Ms. DeVos would like it to be—a private institution, which puts its own narrow view of God first, and creates all curriculum around it.  Everything from the textbooks used, the tests that are given, the movies that students can see (even off campus), right down to the width of the shoulder straps on a young lady’s summer dress—are all dictated by Jerry Falwell Jr, son of the founder of the university (and, some would no doubt say, of God). 

We are speaking, of course, about Liberty University.  Having lived and worked so close to it that we could practically spit on it (we didn’t), we think we have learned  thing or two about Liberty University.  About an educational institution which, as Ms. DeVos has expressed in her plan, would  “advance God’s kingdom.”

​
So now, a chapter excerpted from our book “Liberty’s Tyranny.”


​CHAPTER ELEVEN 
OF POOLS, SCHOOLS, AND GOLDEN RULES
 
 
But now, let us return to the tiny town of Appomattox, and its sister city just down the road, Lynchburg.  You have already heard of my early, grim adventures amongst the Appomattoxins.  Already, then, you can begin to see how I was nervous about the decision I had made, to move my entire life and my beloved museum to the "cooperative, caring, and conscientious" town of Appomattox.
(Those words in quotations are taken directly from their welcoming town website "Mission Statement".  Liars.  Read on.)

The word "Nigger" was already flying around everywhere, all the time.

On my first visit to the new thrift shop cattycorner from the McDonald's, there was a very large rusty circle hook screwed into a piece of a tree, with a chain hanging from the circle hook.  It had seen a lot of wear and tear.  A lot of wear and tear.  I should have bought it, I thought in retrospect.  At least if I had it, nobody else could use it ever again.

It was already, all very, creepy.  It was creepy as spiders in your bloomers.  Creepy as waking to clowns smiling down at you in bed.  Creepy as Salad Fingers.  It was very, very creepy.

Appomattox, Virginia.  The Civil War town where peace was born and now, the home of the annual Railroad Festival—where the Politically Correct Train ironically never stops—was now my new home town.

When I started nosing around about joining political organizations in the town, the first thing that come up on Google was a news story that had gone viral: The local skinhead white supremacists had defaced the Obama campaign signs on the lawn of a local black family; “KKK” and “NIGGER” were spewed across Obama’s name in ugly, eerie black spray paint.
 
                                                                            *************
 
“The true Negro does not want integration.”
— Jerry Falwell - 1958 sermon titled "Segregation or Integration, which?"

This sermon was a response by the good Rev. Falwell to the 1954 Brown v Board of Education SCOTUS  ruling 

​Sometimes, if you get sick of hearing the “N-Word” flying around Appomattox, you can drive a few miles east or west of town, where you will arrive at either Farmville or Lynchburg.  Farmville’s fascinating response to Brown V. Board of Education is chronicled in “Wigger”, the companion book to this cheerful epistle.

Lynchburg we explore right here, right now.  Lynchburg’s jewel-in-the-crown is Liberty University, the pride of Jerry (“Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions”) Falwell.

Also, I can confirm for you that what you are asking yourself right about now is true: that is exactly how Lynchburg got its name.  (They couldn’t get together on the village green and lobby for Appleton or Deerville?  Sheesh.)

Well, our chapter today starts out like this…

…One hot July day in 1961, a group of seven negro children stared longingly through the chain link fence to the cool, refreshing community pool beyond.  They were not welcome there.  Signs made this perfectly clear.  Could these children not read?  And when, as children will, they ignored the warnings and jumped in the pool, they caused a bit of an outrage.  The citizens of Lynchburg, in their righteous indignation, decided that the appropriate response to this affront was simple.  They filled each of the swimming pools up with cement.  Problem solved.

Talk about cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.  The Lynchburg newspaper responded with its usual panache.  On July 8, 1961, Philip Lightfoot Scruggs (is that a Grand Ol’ Opry fiddle pluckin’ name or what?), editor of The News wrote:

“In reference to the above story of pools being closed because negroes sought admission: Now, each of these pools has been drained.  Negro leaders forcing the issue knew that this would be the result of any attempt to integrate either of the pools used by whites.  Perhaps, today, they are proud of their accomplishments and consider their ‘sense of justice’ somehow satisfied.  If so, we suspect that all the other swimmers, both Negro and white, question the value of the accomplishment and wonder a bit at such a strange ‘sense of justice.’ ”
(End newspaper excerpt.)
 
These days, of course, everyone is able to enjoy the city’s public pools.  After all, it’s the 21st century, don’t you know.  But those arrogant, narrow-minded attitudes haven’t disappeared, rather they have been institutionalized.
 
                                                                             *************
 
“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools.  The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.  What a happy day that will be!” — Rev Jerry Falwell, America Can Be Saved, 1979 pp.  52-53, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom
 
                                                                             *************

Today, black students are welcomed at Lynchburg’s Liberty University, which was founded in 1971, just ten years after the swimming pool incident.

Liberty’s stated purpose is to mold “Champions for Christ”.  Now, they don’t much care for the foolish ramblings of one Charles Darwin at the school Jerry Falwell built.  But the Federal Government says that if a University wishes to maintain its tax exempt status, it must teach not just what is printed in the “Good Book”, that is to say Creationism, it must also teach Evolution.  Liberty University’s solution to this dilemma shows that old ideas die hard.  Instead of providing a balanced, factual presentation of both sides of the issue, Liberty teaches Creationism with great passion, while at the same time arming those same students with the “truths” they will need to defend themselves against those who would try to promote the “Lies of the Evolutionists”.

Editor Scruggs would surely have approved of this logic.

​And nowadays, since, at lovely Liberty University, they are currently teaching that people rode dinosaurs for sport and that there were teenage dinosaurs on the ark (true story), you can see that not much evolution (joke) has gone on there since 1961.  Or 1971, for that matter.

CHAPTER TWELVE 

DAMNING DARWIN:
AT LIBERTY TO BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION?
 
 
The Bible is the inerrant ...  word of the living God.  It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.
— Jerry Falwell, Finding Inner Peace and Strength
 

I will grant you that I am a bit of an odd duck.

As a person who spends most of their life researching, editing, proofreading, writing, etcetera, I am as likely to start up a conversation about the Bonfire of the Vanities or Joshua Norton or Boadicea or the annual Avon Ohio Duct Tape Festival, or the fact that certain moths drink elephant tears as a source of trace minerals and protein, as I am likely to chat it up about, oh, say, interest rates on housing loans or the latest fad diet or the mileage that a Prius gets on streets versus highways.  And by that, I am not attempting to subtly suggest that I am somehow more interesting than other people.  I know a large number of folks who will tell you I am quite dull.  Plodding and loquacious, droning and domineering in most conversations.

​That having been said, I have traditionally kept my more offbeat notions to myself.  (Up until now, at least.) My beliefs in reincarnation, in the potential for untapped brain powers such as telekinesis, and the probability that there have most likely been close encounters of the third kind on this planet—those matters I do not bring up, except with my closest friends.  But there is one kooky, “out-there” theory that I do discuss from time to time, as a part of pop culture dialogue, or when events in the news seem to warrant it.
 
Here it is.  I believe in… .

EVOLUTION.

The year was 2009, and a very fine British film was making its way through some smaller art house
theaters and onto DVD.  The name of the film was “Creation.” It was a biopic, as in, while not being a documentary per se, it was a feature film based very literally on the life of Charles Darwin, and it had many factual details about both his personal life and his work woven into the powerful fabric of the story.

In addition to learning a lot of fascinating stories regarding the man about whom I had known very little, I believe that what moved me most was simply watching the arc of his life as he struggled with developing one of the most impactful notions that any human being has ever stumbled upon: it is right up there with the idea of the printing press, space travel, medical miracles, and that entire invisible world of radio waves and microwaves and—well, I think you get my point.

When we hear of men like Darwin and Bach, Galileo and Cervantes, Adams and Jefferson, Lincoln and Leonardo, Moses and Michelangelo, we tend to get this picture of old bearded men, wise and a bit tired, very accomplished and respected—but in the sunset of their years.  We tend to forget that they were once wild and young, bursting with the energy and hubris of youth.  And all that that implies.
What astonishing adventures their strong personalities must have launched them forth into! The imagination reels!

And we, the people, are the beneficiaries of their life’s work.  Of their brave, crazy, life’s work.

So it was interesting to see Darwin as a young man, full of love for his beautiful wife and darling children, embarking upon this great adventure aboard The Beagle, but most importantly, creating a massive tome that would change the way we think about—well—everything, from our origins, to picking a mate, to the relationship between T-Rex and chickens, to the impact of global warming.

It did not occur to me until I saw the movie what a frightening and dangerous and brave thing he was doing by putting forth such brazen notions as evolution and natural selection.

It did not occur to me that most of the people of his time would see him as a villain, in league with the Devil, for assaulting God and the Bible and Creationism.

Most people also wouldn’t know that, given the health challenges his daughter battled, Darwin was wracked with guilt for his entire life, because Darwin eventually understood enough about genetics to know that his decision to marry his own cousin might well have been the cause of his daughter’s agonizing and tragic struggles with her health—of physical anomalies that left her barely clinging to life, for much of her young life.

So compelling did I find the film that naturally, when folks were making small talk with me in town--what have I been up to?, how was my weekend?, did I do anything interesting?  --naturally I effused. 

About “Creation.”

MAN OH MAN, did I get a lecture.
 
Now, as I have said before, I believe in God, in my own version of a Higher Intelligence, and I am even aware of the wording in the end of Revelations: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.”

But I also know about the controversies swirling around the Council of Nicaea.  That discussion is obviously for another time; suffice it to say that my profound belief in a Higher Power is not in conflict with my personal reluctance to believe that the planet Earth was created in just seven calendar days.  Most people would probably add a joke here, but I find that to be both irrelevant and irreverent.

But here is what is extremely relevant.  From the time I brought up the topic of evolution in Appomattox, things changed.  And I was naive enough not to understand the implications of getting into this debate with a number of my neighbors and fellow citizens.  Particularly with the young people—the children of these neighbors and citizens.

I have lived all around the world, spent much of my life in Northern Virginia, and have come to associate religious, political, and social polemics as part of the friendly sparring which is integral to the life of a person who is paying attention to the world.  As part of the life of a citizen in the modern United States of America, of someone who is involved in the socio-political process.  Dialogue?  Town Hall Meeting?  Theatre?  Circus?  What is the correct term these days?

I can remember back when I was still living with my folks, being fascinated by the people they would invite to parties: personages of some gravitas representing various countries and clashing cultures in the Middle East, hashing it out around the kitchen table at two in the morning, following a big dinner, and a lot of drinks.  It was fascinating, informed, impassioned, but never ugly.

Since the Darwin debacle in 2009, I have learned exciting new things about my new home town.  It explains a great deal about Appomattoxins:

The crowning achievement for a parent is to send one’s child to Jerry Falwell’s own Liberty University, a Christian fortress high in the mountains, perfectly positioned to defend itself against atheists, agnostics, faggots, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Hindi, Buddhists, and apparently, Negroes, to read some of the university’s forum postings.  Basically, Liberty takes issue with anyone who takes issue with the dicta of the Southern Baptist Convention.  (The SBC called for all Baptists to boycott Disney, for Pete’s sake.)

(An important aside here is my defense of all the parents of Appomattox whose dream is to see their kids go to Virginia Tech.  There is a heck of a lot of burgundy and orange around Appomattox, and as the daughter of an engineer, I can see why any parent would puff up with pride at the thought of their child getting a degree from VT.  Apart from the fact that, as an alumni of the nationally renown George Mason University Forensics Team, I know we could kick Hokie butt in that area of competition—but otherwise, I have nothing but respect for the school, and especially for the brave and graceful way that they survived and revived from the horrific shootings of a few years ago.  Kudos to you, Virginia Tech.  Ut Prosim.)

But back to Liberty University.
 
JURASSIC PARK, FOR REAL?
 
“Textbooks are Soviet Propaganda”
—Jerry Falwell
 
Did you know that human beings used to ride on dinosaurs?

Bottom line: Liberty University teaches students that the world was created in seven days, that evolution is hogwash, and that the consequences for disagreeing with this stance are harsh, both in this world and the next one.  And when it comes to your GPA at Liberty.  (Just wait till we get to their situational relativistic stand when it comes to sanctioning kidnapping, if it involves taking a little girl away from her gay mother.  Go, RICO!)

And if you doubt that all of this is so, the above facts about Liberty University and its stance on evolution are perhaps the most ubiquitously corroborated set of facts I have ever found on the world wide web.  Even its founders and practitioners shout it from the mountaintops:
 
“We with God’s help, want to see hundreds of our graduates go out into the classrooms teaching creationism - of course they’ll be teaching evolution - but teaching why it’s invalid and why it’s foolish, and then showing the proper way and the correct approach to the origin of the species.”
—Jerry Falwell, 1982
 
“Satan has fathered this monstrous lie of evolution, for he is the father of lies.”
—Henry Morris
 
From Liberty University’s own FIGHTING FUNDAMENTAL FORUMS:
 
Thread: Dragons, Fantasy, and Evolution

​“Evolutionists take very limited information and make up the most incredible stories based on what they find.  How come they can figure out exactly how dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago, including how they socialized, hunted, courted and mated all based on the sparsest evidence, but they can't solve a criminal case with the same amount of information?”

​THE INFILTRATOR: KEVIN ROOSE
 
Once upon a time, a kid named Kevin Roose, who was a sophomore at Brown University (a liberal institution, to say the least), decided to switch gears in a most radical way, and transfer to Liberty University, the world’s largest evangelical Christian college.

From his website: “Hoping to connect with his conservative Christian peers, Roose leaps across the God Divide and embeds himself among Liberty’s 10,000 undergraduates, who call themselves “Champions for Christ.” At Liberty, he sings in Reverend Falwell’s church choir, takes classes like Evangelism 101, and makes surprising discoveries about the true nature of America’s culture war.  The chronicle of Roose’s journey is timely, hilarious, and thought-provoking, and will inspire and entertain believers and non-believers alike.”

Bottom line: Roose’s journey—and his book—are complex, bold, sometimes wonderful, and for another time and place.  But for our purposes, his witness (no religious pun intended) was personal and real; he experienced first-hand what I would term the egregious ridiculousness of what passes for science study at Liberty University.

This may be my favorite tidbit that we learn from his book:

“Kevin Roose describes a True or False question on a ‘History of Life’ exam at Liberty University that asks ‘whether Noah's Ark was large enough to accommodate various species of dinosaurs?’ The acceptable Liberty University answer is ‘true’ based on the conjecture that dinosaurs and humans cohabited the earth after the flood—though the professor allows that Noah may have gathered teenage dinosaurs to make more room”

`And elsewhere, on his webpage blog, Roose offers more glimpses into the examination process at Liberty University.  This is a direct quotation from Roose’s website:

Here, I’m posting a partial list of the questions I was asked to answer on the first midterm for that class, ‘CRST 290/History of Life.’ You decide if Liberty’s scientists are holding anything back:

1.  True or False: Noah’s Ark was large enough to carry various kinds of dinosaurs.
2.  True or False: Science is the only way to truly know truth about the world.
3.  True or False: Margaret Sanger [the founder of Planned Parenthood] was a promoter of eugenics [selective breeding, a practice commonly associated with the Nazi Party].
4.  True or False: Evolution can be proven using the scientific method.

The correct answers (according to Liberty)!

1.  True
2.  False
3.  True
4.  False
(End excerpt.)

 
DAVID DEWITT
 
David DeWitt is the driving force behind the anti-evolution Creationism teaching that goes on at Liberty, and I believe that the excerpted article below tells you everything you need to know about him, for our purposes.  You can, of course, dig up more about him, even read his fascinating research papers, but I believe that a great deal is revealed just by reading this excerpt of an interview with DeWitt conducted by John Safarti for Creation Ministries International at Creation.com
 
THE ARTICLE (EXCERPTED):
BRAIN SCIENTIST DEVELOPS
YOUNG CHRISTIAN MINDS!

Dr.  David DeWitt has a B.S.  in biochemistry from Michigan State University and a Ph.D.  in neuroscience for research in Alzheimer’s Disease from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA.  For the last 12 years, Dr DeWitt has been teaching biology and creation apologetics at Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA.

Like many Christians who studied naturalistic science, he explains that at first, “I believed that God used evolution to create and I also believed in billions of years in a harmonizing fashion.” So what changed his mind?  He tells us:

“One day, I read Psalm 18:30 and was struck by ‘the word of the Lord is flawless.’ The same is repeated in Psalm 12:6 which I also read the same day.  The impact of those verses weighed very heavily on me as I considered the compromise with the Word that I was trying to promote.  If the word of the Lord is flawless, then who am I to depart from what it so plainly says?  If I claim to believe the Bible and that it is flawless, then I should believe every single word and not pick and choose.”

The other vital issue for Dr. DeWitt was the origin of death and suffering, as he explains:

“Evolution requires millions of years of death for natural selection to work its magic for amebas to evolve into college students.  But the Bible was clear that death came as a result of Adam’s sin.  Therefore, death came after man rather than as a means to make man…
 
ALZHEIMER’S DISEASES AND A GOD OF LOVE
 
Back to the issue of death and suffering, it’s clear that one of David’s own fields (the study of Alzheimer’s is his specialty) is highly relevant.  So I asked, how would he explain Alzheimer’s Disease if there is a God of love?  He answered: “The fact that we live in a fallen world is best evidenced by disease.  God is love, but He is also holy and just.  Since God had given Adam dominion over creation, when Adam sinned, God cursed the whole creation (Genesis 3:19, Romans 8:19–23).  I believe that Alzheimer’s Disease is really caused by a breakdown of cellular systems in the brain; a consequence of living in a fallen world.”
 
END OF EXCERPTED ARTICLE
 
We learn from Dr.  Dewitt, among many other intriguing theories, two important points.  First, that evolution is impossible, because there was no death until Adam sinned in the garden about 6000 years ago (according to Biblical scholars).  And secondly, if you are one of the millions coping with the heartbreak of having a loved one afflicted with Alzheimer’s, it is because we live in a fallen world.

Fascinating.

Dewitt’s students adore him, though.  Listen to some of their comments:
 
THE STUDENTS COMMENT ON DR.  DAVID DEWITT
 
“Dewitt is absolutely brilliant.  He really knows what he’s talking about and provides great facts that help dispute the evolutionary lies.”
“I think his testimony is awesome for this class.  Once an evolutionist and now a creationist! Can tell he’s passionate about it.  But yeah his voice can lull you to sleep.  He seems like he just needs a friend.”
“DeWitt may be monotone, but he knows his stuff and loves the Lord.  He gets excited about students being interested in the Lord through creation.”
“Dr.  DeWitt is a very smart man with a big heart for God.  It’s nice to see a scientist taking time to teach others about God’s creative process.  He might be a bit monotoned but his lectures are worth a lot after you leave Liberty.  The things you learn in this class will aid in fighting anti-creationists.”
 
THE FIELD TRIP
 
Last but not least, you should know that in addition to getting nearly half a billion dollars in Pell Grants, (receiving MORE of your taxpayers dollars than NPR), Liberty University offers one last perk to students who study and proselytize about Creationism.  They get to go to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and make fun of it.
 
DAVID OLSEN of THE PRESS ENTERPRISE
COVERS ONE SUCH TRIP IN HIS ONLINE ARTICLE:
 
Here is it, excerpted per copyright guidelines:

“Liberty University, an evangelical Baptist institution in Lynchburg, Virginia, offers a minor in Creation Studies and teaches the biblical six-day, 24-hour explanation for creation alongside evolution in biology classes,” said David DeWitt, a professor of biology at Liberty.  Students discuss what DeWitt views as the flaws in evolutionary theory and in the way most scientists measure the age of fossils.

They plan to become doctors, researchers and professors, but these students from Liberty University, an evangelical school, also believe that God created the Earth in a week, around 6,000 years ago.  Each year, a group of biology students at the Christian university based in Lynchburg, Virginia, travels to the Natural History Museum in Washington to learn about a theory they dismiss as incorrect, “Darwin's Theory of Evolution.”

The young Creationists examined a model of the Morganucodon rat, believed to be the first and common ancestor of mammals that appeared some 210 million years ago.  Lauren Dunn, 19, a second-year biology student, was unimpressed.  “A million years, that’s arbitrary.  They put that time to make up for what they don’t know,” she said.

Creationism and evolutionism have different ways of explaining the evidence.  The Creationist way recognizes the importance of biblical records, said Marcus Ross, who teaches paleontology.  He teaches his students that dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the Earth 4,000 to 5,000 years ago during the flood that Noah survived by building an ark.  He says carbon-dating techniques that have been used to suggest the Earth is in fact billions of years old are simply not reliable.
 
END ARTICLE
 
 
What a wonderful way to spend our tax dollars.

But lest you fear that there is lack of gratitude among these students, these future scientists, we leave this chapter with a few posts from those inspiring Fighting Fundamental Forums.  This is what they are being taught at Liberty University, in lieu of evolution.  Yes, I think it is fair to say that evolution has come to a screeching halt at Liberty.
 
POST NUMBER ONE:
“I want to thank you for your excellent post on evolution.  I once considered myself to be an atheist, largely because I was deceived by the dirty ol’ devil’s story of evolution.  I was taught evolution as a young man by crafty scientists and “teachers” and became blinded by Satan’s lies.  I believed that my ancestors were monkeys.  It hardened my heart and I was unable to feel Jesus’ love for me and kept me from truly seeing that it was the almighty Lord who created all things in heaven and on earth.
After years of wandering in the valley of sin and despair, kind and loving Christians, like yourselves, helped me to see the truth.  They showed me that it’s impossible for a watch just to come into existence.  And if it’s impossible for a relatively simple thing as a watch, then it must be impossible for something as complex as life.  Life just can’t self assemble over billions of years.  My ancestors aren’t monkeys at all.  We were all created by the almighty Lord.  I couldn’t believe that I had been so deceived by science.  It truly is a tool of Satan.  I hope someday we can outlaw the teaching of evolution in our public schools.  It’s a shame that our public schools are tools for the dirty ol’ devil to distribute his filthy lies.”
May God bless you two
wonderful boys.
Your friend in Christ
 
POST NUMBER TWO:
“If in evolution, only the strong survive, why do the tree hugging nature lovers keep trying to save weak, stupid animals such as whales that beach themselves.  Leave them alone and let evolution take its course.”
 
POST NUMBER THREE:
“Dinosaurs lived in the days of Adam and Eve and were able to live to thousands of years old also and we all know that reptiles never stop growing until they die which accounts for their size.  Any disputation on this subject will be gladly argued.  I know I’m right.”
 
And perhaps my favorite one, because it connects sinners with balding, your humble “Wigger” author offers you:

POST NUMBER FOUR:
“I don't believe in evolution as taught in our public schools.  I believe the God of the Bible did it.  We have evolved into something ugly because of our own choices, is my real opinion.  Those ruts on our faces and thinning hair could be a result of many years of worry caused by the consequences of our sin.  But it is evolution in progress, don’t you agree?”
 
                                                                              *************
 
I have already spoken about the somewhat incestuous relationship between the population at Liberty University and the citizenry of Appomattox, and of the dangerous Trifecta operation therein: Instruction, Corroboration, and Validation.  Suffice it to say that this Trifecta goes a long way towards explaining the next bizarre event which happened not in Lynchburg, but twenty miles down the road, on my home turf.
 
Here is a real gem: Steve told me that he decided there was just too much trouble to be had from using the internet—he’d heard of marriages being ruined by people sparking up old Facebook connections, and he also had a 14 year old daughter to worry about, so he said “I just cut it off.”

Actually my response was to applaud him, because Steve leads a simple landscaper’s life, (and there is internet at the local library, if he really needs it), so there is actually no reason that he needs to expose his daughter to the potential dangers of the world wide web, and himself to a fifty dollar a month internet bill.

“So you just had it cut it off?” I said, semi-impressed.

“No,” he said, “I mean I cut it off.  I got a big pair of garden sheers and went out back and cut the cable.”

He was serious.  How he did not electrocute himself, I do not know.

At first I secretly applauded this Ludditic stroke, until I realized that this is the modus operandi for most of the Appomattoxins.  I.E., evolution is a lie, gays will burn in hell, the Pope is the anti-Christ, the internet is evil, even many PG movies should be banned, etcetera.

It was only when I probed further that I found out specifically why Steve had his internet cut off: because the government was using it to circulate a big hoax that there had once been water on Mars.
Steve ranted to me about how he was very upset, having read that "now they are talking about the possibility of water on Mars! From this, they're gonna try to convince us that there was once life on Mars, which is a repudiation of Genesis, which is an attempt to completely undermine the Bible, which is all part of the government’s plot to kill God." Plus, Steve is getting very angry, almost foaming at the mouth, because “now that they put that story about water on Mars on the World Wide Web, you can never get that garbage off the Internet.  That’s how the government is going to try to kill God for the people…It's all part of this big plot, you see…”

Later, Steve’s son will turn out to be a proud graduate of Liberty University.  Are you with me so far?  Also later, I was to learn that this matter of water on Mars has the Baptist Fundamentalists in an uproar, but their version of the “scientific community” has come rushing to the rescue, with some fascinating explanations.  Here is one of my favorites, from the FIGHTING FUNDAMENTAL FORUMS, which you will find on Liberty University’s own website:

“When God created the universe he created it replete with beams of photons in place to give the impression that those photons have been traveling in space for billions of years.  The universe in only 6000 years old, plus or minus.”  (Sneaky ol’ God!)
(de-emphasis added)

And this next poor forum poster is almost apoplectic; I am afraid he/she is going to burst a vessel explaining all the reasons there just can’t be water on Mars OR life on other planets:
 
From fixed earth.com

Mars Missions, Part III:

NASA’s Latest Lies Seek To End The Evolution Debate And
Declare Victory…Over The Bible’s Origins Scenario

NASA’s press releases have given the impression world-wide that the pictures and soil and rock analyses from Mars confirm water-dug canyons and lake-beds that are now dry craters… People everywhere now believe that science has proven that Mars was awash in liquid water at some point and that some kinds of microbial life forms have evolved there in the last four Billion years.  That’s the message the world has received...and the message it believes to be a scientific fact.

Do taxpayers know how many billions of their taxes are spent to finance this continuing avalanche of pseudo-scientific propaganda about water and evolving life in the universe??  Do they know that this whole massive effort is geared solely to destroying the Bible’s Creation Account and the God of the Bible?  I don’t think so.

Do they know that the means of destroying faith in the Biblical Creation and its God rests on establishing factless evolution mythology as a "scientific" explanation for the origin of the universe,  
Earth, Mankind?  I don’t think so…Additionally, acceptance involves rejection of the anti-evolutionary Biblical cosmology where the universe is 6000 years old and no more than one light day thick.
(Emphasis added.)
 
                                                                                *************
 
POST SCRIPT: I decided not to leave this particular chapter with our baldness being explained by our Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden.  (After all, what does that say about people like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and Son of Sam and Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez and Rodney Alcala aka The Dating Game Killer—they all sported full, thick heads of hair.  And they dismembered people and ate them.  In fact, an inordinate number of death row killers have tresses to be envied.)

​Instead, I offer you quotations from scientists who found their faith reaffirmed and heightened by having the courage to look more and more deeply into the cosmos, as God reveals it to us:
 
“The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.”
—Charles Darwin
 
“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense … I am a deeply religious man.”
—Albert Einstein
 
“I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.”
—Verner Von Braun, German-American rocket scientist
 
“Science can have a purifying effect on religion, freeing it from beliefs of a pre-scientific age and helping us to a truer conception of God.  At the same time, I am far from believing that science will ever give us the answers to all our questions.”
—Neville Mott, English physicist, awarded 1977 Nobel Prize
 
“From religion comes a man’s purpose; from science, his power to achieve it.  Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another.  They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another.  It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.”
—William H Bragg, British physicist, chemist, mathematician.
Awarded Nobel Prize in 1915
 
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.  When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual...The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
—Carl Sagan, American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author
 
“What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science … This doesn’t prove that there is no God….”
—Stephen Hawkings, English physicist and cosmologist
 
“If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?”
—Milton Berle
 
“A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.  The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
—Fred Hoyle, English mathematician and astronomer.
 
“I am very much a scientist, and so I naturally have thought about religion also through the eyes of a scientist.  When I do that, I see religion not denominationally, but in a more, let us say, deistic sense.  I have been influenced in my thinking by the writing of Einstein who has made remarks to the effect that when he contemplated the world he sensed an underlying Force much greater than any human force.  I feel very much the same.  There is a sense of awe, a sense of reverence, and a sense of great mystery.”
—Walter Kohn, American physicist, awarded Nobel Prize in 1998
 
“I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient.  It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experiences in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us.  It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, god and eternity.”
—Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist, awarded Nobel prize in 1933
 
“It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.”
—Max Planck, German physicist, noted for work on quantum theory
 
“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.  In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.”
—From Einstein’s response to a letter from sixth-grade student Phyllis Wright, regarding the existence of God

​        By Meg Langford                            
 
                
I know how to shame the new President, come inauguration day.  I know the entity that is capable of pulling it off.

And no, it is not Beyoncé, Kanye, or Aretha Franklin.  It is not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin.  It is not Anderson Cooper or John Oliver or Megyn Kelley or even Ted Nugent, who is as of this writing apparently the only entertainer who will consider sharing a stage with Drumpf.

It is the one entity that has been able to steal the show since moving pictures were invented.  (I myself have an eternal crush on Shirley Temple).

Kids.  I am talking about the kids of America. 

Not only is the modest proposal offered forth in the blog that follows quite serious…I will go so far as to say that I am being as serious as I have ever been.

What we need, people, is a Million Kid March against Donald Trump.

And it needs to happen on Inauguration Day.  January Twentieth.   Get out the long underwear and the ear muffs and the kiddie trapper hats and the idiot mittens with the strings and clips; we are about to create the youngest generation of hippies in history.  Winter hippies.

Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking, and you are right.  At first, the logistics seemed impossible to me, too.  My father was actually a logistical engineer in the Air Force, and quite a fine one, with a few textbooks and some ranks and clearance to his name, so I think about things in logistical terms quite a lot.  When the crew here at Pickford Studios first batted the idea around, it seemed like a logistical nightmare.  A million kids?  On the mall?  And of course, that would really mean more like two or three or four million people, since of course those kids would be accompanied by parents.  Also seems like a pedophile’s wet dream, if all the proper security is not in place.

But dig it:

We don’t need a million kids on the mall.  (We can build up to that, culminating in a Million Kid March on the actual Washington Mall, say, on July 4th, 2020.  Or Election Day, 2020.  Stay tuned.)

But no, why not just make it a Million Kid March in thousands of communities across this great nation?  That way, it is easily arranged in tiny towns and hamlets across America, as easily as if folks were planning a bake sale or a pep rally.  The total numbers will be easy to tally.  Locals can do head counts, it will all be documented on the local evening news, and at the end of the day, we can see just how many kids turn out to turn their futures around.

The idea is this:  kids in each town or city start at a logical Point A, like their school, and march to a logical Point B, like some meaningful monument or civic building nearby.  And they bring with them posters.  Placards.  Recited evidence, and solid reasons that they are now and eternally against the presidency of Donald Trump.   But more on that in Part Two of our blog.

Let’s go back to the idea of a Million Kid March.

And by the way, since I am my usual logorrheic self in this blog, let me cut to the basics, for those of you in a hurry.  It would go something like this:

1.  Fire of the gist of this blog to everyone on your email tree, phone tree, Facebook group, etcetera.
2. Coordinate with other interested parents at the school.
3. Teach your children the reality of their country’s future, and of the planet’s environment, under a Trump presidency.
4. Consider T-shirts; they create a unifying presence.  Organizing kids is a bit like herding cats; kids are not known for presenting a unified front.
5. March on January 20th.

There.  Eazy Peasy, right?  Admit it; your last fundraiser took more out of you.

And no, you don’t have to register, get permission, coordinate with other marches, fill out an application, follow a format, give me your email address, or pay a fee.
 
                                                                                 *****
 
I remember distinctly the conversation that took place as the Pickford Studios crew was driving home from Orlando, Florida, from the site of the Pulse shooting.  It was about six months ago. We were talking about Trump’s momentum in the presidential campaign, and sardonically concluded that, as angry as we were, the bitter truth was that it ultimately wouldn’t impact us all that much.  We are all older people; our lives have largely been lived and our plans for the future are relatively intact.  There isn’t much Trump can do to us.  But there is a great deal that Trump can do to destroy the future of this country.  And of the world.

We may not be able to do anything about the next four years.  But it is never too early to start planning on victory in 2020.  To plot the demise of the Donald.

The part about stealing Trump’s thunder a month from now is pretty delicious too, especially given that he is a Narcissistic Megalomaniac, if ever there was one.  (Watch for my upcoming blog about Trump as Psychopath.)  And trust me, kids are the secret. 

Kids are the Secret Weapon, and the proof is in history.  They can get the public’s attention and steal everybody’s thunder when nobody else can:

You think Rosa Parks was so great?  Well, yes, she was.  But she often overshadows the child who was her inspiration, a fifteen-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin who took the same heroic stand nine months earlier, when she refused to give up her seat to a white person.  This child was brutalized by the local cops who, among other things, inexplicably kept calling her a “whore” as they kicked her, then dragged her to the local jail, fingerprinted her, and booked her, all the while jokingly trying to guess her bra size.  But she won out in the end; it was her heroism that impelled Rosa and Martin Luther King and a group of other progressives to plan not only the Parks incident, but the crippling bus boycott, all of which changed American history and moved us that much closer to equality.
Claudette Colvin changed the course of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.  And she was a mere child when she did so.

In November of 1982, when it seemed that the Cold War would never thaw, it took a letter from ten year old Samantha Smith, addressed to a man named Yuri Andropov to start melting the ice.  Andropov had just succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union, while far away in the great state of Maine, Samantha Smith was worried about the shadow of nuclear war.  So she did the logical, polite thing.  She wrote a letter to the new Russian leader expressing her concerns.  Here is the letter Samantha wrote to Yuri Andropov:
 
Dear Mr. Andropov,
 
My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.
 
Sincerely,
 
Samantha Smith
 
Here is Andropov’s reply:

Dear Samantha,
 
I received your letter, which is like many others that have reached me recently from your country and from other countries around the world.
It seems to me – I can tell by your letter – that you are a courageous and honest girl, resembling Becky, the friend of Tom Sawyer in the famous book of your compatriot Mark Twain. This book is well known and loved in our country by all boys and girls.
 
You write that you are anxious about whether there will be a nuclear war between our two countries. And you ask are we doing anything so that war will not break out.
Your question is the most important of those that every thinking man can pose. I will reply to you seriously and honestly.
 
Yes, Samantha, we in the Soviet Union are trying to do everything so that there will not be war on Earth. This is what every Soviet man wants. This is what the great founder of our state, Vladimir Lenin, taught us.
 
Soviet people well know what a terrible thing war is. Forty-two years ago, Nazi Germany, which strove for supremacy over the whole world, attacked our country, burned and destroyed many thousands of our towns and villages, killed millions of Soviet men, women and children.
 
In that war, which ended with our victory, we were in alliance with the United States: together we fought for the liberation of many people from the Nazi invaders. I hope that you know about this from your history lessons in school. And today we want very much to live in peace, to trade and cooperate with all our neighbors on this earth — with those far away and those nearby. And certainly with such a great country as the United States of America.
 
In America and in our country there are nuclear weapons — terrible weapons that can kill millions of people in an instant. But we do not want them to be ever used. That's precisely why the Soviet Union solemnly declared throughout the entire world that never — never — will it use nuclear weapons first against any country. In general we propose to discontinue further production of them and to proceed to the abolition of all the stockpiles on Earth.
 
It seems to me that this is a sufficient answer to your second question: 'Why do you want to wage war against the whole world or at least the United States?' We want nothing of the kind. No one in our country–neither workers, peasants, writers nor doctors, neither grown-ups nor children, nor members of the government–want either a big or 'little' war.
 
We want peace — there is something that we are occupied with: growing wheat, building and inventing, writing books and flying into space. We want peace for ourselves and for all peoples of the planet. For our children and for you, Samantha.
 
I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country, the best time being this summer. You will find out about our country, meet with your contemporaries, visit an international children's camp – Artek – on the sea. And see for yourself: in the Soviet Union, everyone is for peace and friendship among peoples.
 
Thank you for your letter. I wish you all the best in your young life.
 
Y. Andropov
 
Forgive me, but I find it hard to imagine Vladimir Putin penning such a letter.  And ever sadder still, even as I write this (December 22nd, 2016), in a horrifically bizarre twist of timing and fate, Trump has just tweeted: “the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.”

Oh My God.  Our new president has just basically pledged that he will ratchet up the arms race.  And poke a very large and terrifying sleeping bear.

But not even Trump can take away Samantha Smith’s legacy.  For a brief and shining moment, Samantha Smith became an international celebrity for her peaceful overtures towards Russia, and she shamed the grown-ups into re-examining their prejudices. 

The power of pleading children.

Millions of people purchase gorgeous carpets produced from exotic locales in the Middle East, but at what cost?   Born in 1983, Iqbal Masih was just one example of enslaved armies of child laborers who even today live a hellish childhood, just so we can have something pretty under our feet.   Born in 1983 in Punjab, Pakistan, he was sold into child labor by his parents, their way of paying back a loan worth six American dollars.  At the tender age of four, Iqbal was forced to rise before dawn, walk down dark and treacherous country roads, and then work for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, while tightly bound by chains.  He escaped, was tortured, escaped again, and at the age of twelve became an international spokesperson against child slavery.

The charisma of kids.

When the U.S.S. Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese torpedo at the end of World War II, and every survivor on that ship believed that their beloved Captain McVay was wrongly court  martialed because the Navy desperately needed a scapegoat to save face in front of an outraged nation, those hundreds of survivors were not able to change the ruling of the court, and McVay’s reputation was ruined.  Nor were the journalists and authors who took up the cause able to change the court’s mind.  Nor were the politicians who campaigned to get the unjust court martial reversed.  Nope, it wasn’t until an upstart director named Steven Spielberg made a terrifying movie called “Jaws” which was then seen by a twelve year old kid named Hunter Scott (like the hero from a novel, that name, yeah?) did the momentum start to swing the other way.  Hunter Scott was mesmerized by the haunting scene in which Quint describes being a sailor on the doomed Indianapolis.  When Hunter asked his father if it was all true, his father gave the stock good dad answer:  “Look it up.”  Later, thanks to a history project created by the passionate and intrepid ‘tween, history itself was finally rewritten.  And Captain McVay was vindicated.  Talk about the power of kids: just picture Hunter Scott testifying before the Congress of the United States.  In 2000, Congress then passed a resolution that McVay's record should reflect that "he is exonerated for the loss of the USS Indianapolis." President Clinton also signed the resolution. In July 2001, Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England ordered McVay's official Navy record purged of all wrongdoing.
 
Kids.
 
And we hardly even need to repeat the stories of how Anne Frank and Malala Yousafzai served as voices for millions who could not get their message out to the world.

And just to repeat what I have iterated in previous blogs:  I am not talking about Democrats versus Republicans, or even liberals versus conservatives.  I believe in a strong military, and you cannot have lived seventeen years in California, nor have witnessed the madness in Europe, without believing in some sane, sound plan for curbed immigration.  No, I am talking about those moments when Trump basically manifested sheer psychopathy:  being cavalier about dropping nuclear weapons, and his willingness to pull out of the Paris Climate Treaty, and to gut the EPA, and to conduct a witch hunt for those who would fight the deadly consequences of climate change. It is quite one thing to think you know more than your neighbor, or some politician.  It is quite another thing to think you know more than the majority of scientists on the planet.

Let’s face it.  It is not the grown-ups who should be terrified of Trump.  (Although if you are an adult Latino, Muslim, Jew, black, or female, you should certainly be mightily offended by him and his potty mouth.) 

No, it is the children of America who should be truly terrified. 

Factoid:  there are about 75 million human beings in the United States who classify as “kids”, i.e., under eighteen. 

That means that for the “Million Kid March” to work, only one out of every 75 kids would have to get off of their Fruit Roll Up butts on January 20th and march, carrying signs and powerful visuals, from their school to the nearest monument of meaning in their tiny town, to make a complete idiot of Trump, as he is being sworn in.  To steal his thunder.  That sounds doable, yes? 

And given that those above mentioned 75 kids have approximately 30 parents (the average couple having roughly 2.5 kids), that means that only about one pair of every 30 parents need to get off their Snackwell asses to march with their kids for the future of the world.   Again, I maintain that that sounds eminently “doable”.  After all, there are a great many adults who are going to be very, very angry on January 20th.   And some of them are even Republicans.
 
 
      HOW TO ACTUALLY GET A MILLION KIDS.
 
I will grant you, getting a million kids for a Million Kid March may seem like a bit of a stretch for this first event—our spoiling of Trump’s inaugural—but it could be done.  Let’s break down the math. 

There are fifty states in the union; divide one million by fifty states and that means we would need 20,000 kids marching in each state.  That seems alternately doable and impossible, depending on which state you picture.  States like New York and California seem handily up to the task.  Wyoming, Missouri, Arkansas … not so much.  The more realistic way to picture the million kid march is to think of it akin to the House of Representatives.  As any kid who took high school civics knows (and let’s face it, lots of us got a lesson in advanced civics when we realized that Hillary got the most votes, but Trump is the new president), we have a Senate and a House of Representatives, the Senate having two elected representatives per state, and the House of Representatives having numbers that vary per state, depending on the population of the particular state in question.  A quick cruise to Wikipedia can not only explain the brilliant symmetry of this bicameral system, but will offer a table of the exact number of representatives.  If the expectation of marching kids per state were roughly analogous to the representatives for each state, then the “responsibilities” and “expectations” of each state, in terms of providing kids marching against trump, becomes immediately clearer. 

Listen up, this gets a wee bit thick:

There are 435 representatives total, in the House Of.  Divide one million by 435, and you come up with 2298.85057471.  We will, of course, round that off to 2300.   So, just as more densely populated states have more representatives (California has 53 and New York has 27), and just as states with sparser populations have fewer reps (Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota each have just 1 representative), so we could expect that the states with much larger populations might be able to rally a greater march of kids (and their parents).   Of course, it goes without saying that the redness or blueness of any given state would also impact a state’s performance. But let’s face it; there are a hell of a lot of frustrated Democrats inhabiting “red” states.  And most of those Democrats have kids.  This is the time for those feisty and frustrated spirits to express themselves. 

So I am hoping that you get my numerical drift:   States like Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, Delaware, and Alaska would only have to contribute 2300 marching kids each to help us achieve our goal.   However, California, sprawling across the left coast, would be under more pressure:  with 53 Representatives, they would have to produce 121,900 (2300 times 53) to produce their “share” of the Million Kid March.  According to the California Department of Education, there are 6,235,520 kids going to school in that state, which mean, in order to produce their “share” in the Million Kid March, only one out of every 2711 kids (6,235,520 divided by 2300) would have to walk away from their X-Box and march down the street and get some goddam fresh air and do their part to save the future of the planet.  Again, so very doable.

(Sidebar: with a whimsy I have come to expect from the crazy state of California, where I lived seventeen years of my life, I could not help but notice that on the official cde.gov site, where they list the actually number of schools in California [I instead counted kids], the official site lists the number of schools, mysteriously enough, at “10,3939”.      California.  Gotta love it.)

So there you get a general idea of the math, using the House of Representatives as a template, apportioning out the expectations of each state according to their populations.  Frankly, I find it thrilling how realistic it sounds.

And what if we don’t get a million kids, marching against Trump on Inauguration Day?  What if we don’t get half a million?  What if, thanks to the fervent and planet-saving efforts of the legions of kids and grown-ups reading this, what if we only get thousands of kids marching from their schools to some cherished local monument, each of them capable of reciting, through a new understanding, the appalling facts and figures, the terrifying reality, of a world ruled by Trump?  Everybody from the tiniest local news station to the biggest members of the Fourth Estate would no doubt find it irresistible.  These are kids, pleading for mercy and reason, after all.

And over and over and over again, from his morning session in the tanning bed through his dopey inaugural balls with his supermodel wife (or I guess Ivanka, who is to be his true new dancing partner and First Lady), the camera would find itself moving away from the Tangerine Man, and onto to faces of the Future of America.

And that is exactly how it should be.

​By Meg Langford
 
There may not be much in this letter that smacks of originality.  Mr. Trump, you simply do not inspire novel thoughts.  Your words do not help people to dream, imagine, or otherwise fantasize about some different, better world—unless it is to return to a kingdom in American’s distant past, where white people reign supreme, and people of more swarthy complexions clean your house, scrub your toilet, cook your meals, iron your shirts, and pick the crops in your field.  But no—other than imagining a time that is happily gone with the wind, you do not inspire your political opponents with fresh, new ideas.  Rather, you frighten us with old dreads, buried fears, and the kind of hate that we keep thinking we had left behind in our dream to climb to the mountaintop.

By Meg Langford 


Oh so very recently….
 
Pickford Studios’ big teal green Suburban, lovingly nicknamed “The Dragon” broke down on a remote highway, spewing so much steam, it really did look like a mighty, but vanquished, dragon.

Then our other car broke down before the dragon could be healed.

The air conditioning system failed.  In Florida.  In June.  Couldn’t be repaired.  Brand new $6000 system required.  (Same week as the Pulse shooting.  And that baby, torn from his father’s side, killed by a gator at the Happiest Place on Earth, just down the road.)

Our mother, now in her 80’s, thinks she is nineteen.  No, now it’s seventeen.  She thinks she is going to the Governor’s Ball.   This is between frightened and angry outbursts, the dark side of dementia.  Just last month we were asked to move her as the assisted living facility was unable to control those outbursts.  She is doing much better at her new home, but what will the next phase of this terrible disease bring?  We witness her private hell with an agonizing sense of helplessness.

A dear friend’s wife died tragically young, like something from a heartbreaking song.  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and cry for him.  For a third of a century, although for a long while we fell out of touch, this loveable court jester bastard has been my buddy. 

Our miniature museum was nearly destroyed in a great flood.

A dear friend’s family was washed away in a great flood.  Even the dog. 

Speaking of dogs.  My dog died in my arms.  

My other dog was eaten by a bear.

A dog ate my homework.
 
                                                                                    *****
 
Only one of the above statements is untrue.
 
                                                                                    *****

This has been one of the worst three times of my life.  The other two were equally memorable.  There was the fall of 2009.  Global economic collapse.  Los Angeles was hit hard. My house finally hit rock bottom, going from a comparable of 800,000 to 183,000.   I walked away with nothing.  The big fight then was my struggle to keep my three rescue dogs.  The other worst time was when I was homeless, actually homeless, and sleeping in the back of a hundred year old brick building throughout a Virginia winter, with no heat.  And this, after I had been clean of drugs for well over a decade.

I didn’t include among the three worst times the time I was kicked out of the University of Maryland PhD program, just days after I failed Len Bias and turned in his teammate for cheating.  A decade of higher education.  Credits completed. GPA: 3.8   Dissertation done after five drafts.  Then: Lefty Driesell happens.  

(I apparently don’t reek of education.  Once, at the 99 Cents Store, a clerk told me my ride was leaving.  She pointed to the bright Ticonderoga yellow Special Education School bus.  Another time, while I was sitting outside the grocery store on a hot day with an empty cup, someone dropped a quarter in it.  They said they would pray for me.  I kept the quarter.)
 
                                                                                   *****
 
People always act like it’s this terrible thing, to feel sorry for yourself.  If all of the above doesn’t warrant a grand pity party, I’ll be damned if I know what does.  And who is more perfectly poised to feel sorry for me than me?  Besides, then nobody else has to.  My heart is breaking for my two friends—and I can’t even begin to imagine the depths of their grief.  So there hasn’t been much blogging lately.  But there will be.  Because if there is anything good for the writing process, its misery. 

Counter-intuitively, some beautiful, luscious, impassioned writing can come out of that kind of suffering.  Arnost Lustig taught me that.  (There have been many good times, too.)
It always amazes me that our blogs get no comments.  I figure that means our opinions, and the evidence that supports them, are either rhetoric perfected. 

Or, alternatively, complete bullshit.

This bone-chilling time for me—and for the Pickford Studios Crew—is as good a time to thank our readers (or, when I am puffed up, my “audience”) for our astonishing numbers.  10,000 visits in July alone, for a blog not even one year old.

We will be writing soon.   Details about the travails, of course.

Perhaps then you can determine whether I have exaggerated.  I don’t think so, not much.  That list sure as hell feels accurate.

In the meantime, please consider supporting our blog posts by reading them, re-reading the articles you find memorable, and most important, sharing.  You see, not only do we offer ad-free Longform, thoroughly researched, by award winning writers.  But on top of all of our other problems, we are very frequently ghost-banned by Facebook. 

Ghost-banned by Facebook.  This is an evil and insidious new form of censorship, whereby YOU can see your post, proudly placed there, within the appropriate context, tagged to the appropriate article, on Facebook.  But nobody else can.  You ask a friend to log on, they can’t see it.  But—unless you learn about ghost-banning, you go through your day blithely thinking you have posted a pertinent comment.  Really, Mark Zuckerberg?  All those cheesy movie links make it.  How “you can make 87 dollars an hour on line, starting today!!!” makes it.  Profanity makes it.  Cyber-bullying and name-calling make it.  But not our links to chapters excerpted from a new groundbreaking book on racism?  For those of you not familiar with our two volume book, it is called “The Little Book of Lynching.”  Of course, with all of the ghost-banning going on, you might not know that.

The Zuckman can be a real turd sometimes.

We would also like you to support our museum, still in grave danger, (water damage), by clicking on MUSEUM under HOME at moviesforyourmind.net.  The visits from you embolden and encourage us to plod on.  (The pictures are just a smidgeon of our collection.)  And, sometimes, it helps us sell a few books on Amazon.

Oh yeah.  While we are talking about rough luck, the museum is dedicated to a girl killed by a drunk driver on Christmas Day.  And born on Mother’s Day.

May God Bless You, Michelle.

​Folks, your support is appreciated. 
 
Peace. Out.

By Evelyn Ryman

This was written two years ago, in the summer of 2014, shortly after the death of Robin Williams.  As great fans of the Pan’s work, we plan on reposting this every year.  We missed his birthday this year, but thought we would post it today, on the anniversary of his passing, so that we all may stop what we are doing and celebrate the life and times  of a brilliant and beautiful mind.

                                                                                       ***

Robin Williams is gone.   The stories are here and gone:  coroner’s cause of death, tentative reasons as to why he did it, reminiscences about his amazing career, shared stories of a chance encounter.  We all know what happens next.  The tawdry, the titillating, the tabloids--fights about the will, rumors about a secret life, speculations about things that are none of our business.  Even as I write this, there is breaking news from some BBC codger critic, accusing Robin’s movies of being too cloyingly sweet. Bugger him.

I suggest, out of respect for a man we all came to love, that we boycott those stories.  

Instead, I suggest to you … that we designate a “Robin Williams Day.   July 21st is as great a day as any: it is the birthday of this brilliant, hilarious, warm, wonderful human being.

Here are some thoughts about why we should have a “Robin Williams Day”, and how we should celebrate it:

Reason The First:  Robin Williams may quite possibly have been the funniest man in the world.  I am personally very leery of superlatives, but I ask you, if Robin Williams was not the funniest man in the world, who was?   Was anybody ever so completely “on”?  Pick and peruse any YouTube play list of Robin, and see if this isn’t the cosmic truth of it.  I am one of many people who was sometimes literally afraid to laugh when he was guest on a talk show, because I thought I might miss something.  In fact, Robin Williams was so reliably funny that Spielberg used to call him up frequently during the filming of “Schindler’s List” and put him on speakerphone, just so that Robin could cheer up a cast that was weary to the bone of being soul drenched in the Holocaust.  Now that’s a funny guy.

Yes, there are other funny people on the planet.  Steve Martin is respected around the world, but by his own admission, he chose proactively to walk away from “being funny” in order to pursue his other passion, music.  And yes, there is a slew of up and coming comedians, and actors who are so very funny: Aziz Ansari, John Mulaney, Hannibal Buress, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, Amy Schumer, Louis C.K., Seth Rogen, the list could of course go on and on.  And there are those comic savants who have taken it upon themselves to make the ghastly news of modern times more palatable: Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, John Oliver.  But all of these people have only been making us laugh for a decade or two.  I don’t think you get credit for being the Funniest Person in the World unless you have dodged the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune long enough to be qualified for membership in AARP: surviving life is rarely a funny business, but if you can keep your sense of humor intact throughout the journey, you’re a better man than I am, Gungadin.  Better than most of us.’

And if there is somebody else on some other continent, in some other country, wouldn’t we know about it from YouTube?  And yes, the sometimes negative critiques of Robin’s acting performances may have distracted us from crowning him Funniest Man in the World, but if you ponder the matter, it was precisely his need to be “funny Robin Williams” in so many of his roles that kept him from exploring the nuances some of us craved:  he had many great movie performances, but you were always aware that you were watching Robin Williams.  And then, there were the roles where he did have nuance. Where he made the finest actors on the planet stare in awe.  The performances that changed the lives of the people who witnessed them.  “Dead Poet’s Society” was such a performance, for me. 

But now that we have the benefit of thoughtful hindsight, I suggest to you that when we lost Robin, we lost The Funniest Man in the World.

Reason The Second:  We are having a particularly hard time with this one.  When beloved persons of talent die of their demons at a “young” age (I know that’s a subjective term), we have a special category in our heads and our hearts for them:  we know they are dead soldiers in a new war--well, not a new war, perhaps, but a war that is being discussed more openly and in more detail than ever it has been in the history of humans.  I refer to the War on Addictions.  Among those tragically fallen:  Jimmy Hendrix, Janet Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Belushi, River Phoenix, Len Bias, Chris Farley, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, Whitney Houston, Cory Monteith, Philip Seymour Hoffman. We are heartbroken to see them go, but all wars have collateral damage, and the best we can do is keep fighting the war on all fronts.    

And when a beloved person of talent dies at a “ripe old age” (again subjective, especially as one gets older), we have a sense that they were not cheated, nor were we--of their performances, that is.   When we think of George Burns, Bob Hope, Katherine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, James Garner, Andy Griffith, Jessica Tandy, Lauren Bacall, Shirley Temple Black--this list could go on and on, of course--we feel a peace because they are at peace, and then turn our reflections to their bountiful contribution to the arts.

But we are having a damnable time with the death of Robin Williams.  He seemed to have survived his demons, and slain his dragons.  He had been sober for decades, and when he slipped, he got his butt back into rehab.  He was 63, and even if he might have had the occasional creative flub, the world was his oyster with an “R” in every month, and he should have been able to live out his life secure in the adulation of a world wide audience.  He should have been able to cherry pick his projects, from film and television to stand-up and--well, whatever the hell he wanted.  He was, after all, Robin Williams. In essence, he should have been George Burns or Bob Hope, making us guffaw well into his twilight years, dying in his sleep with a smile on his face.  To quote Dudley Moore in “Arthur,” laughing even in slumber, “Sometimes I just think funny things”.  

Reason The Third:  The worthiness of having a Robin Williams Day exists for the same reason that having any other day dedicated to a single person is a noble thing:  the day immediately resonates and becomes about so much more than just that one person.  Abraham Lincoln Day is about so much more than an attorney from Kentucky; it is actually about slavery and freedom, human dignity and the true American dream.  Martin Luther King Day is about more than a black activist; it is about a man who deftly and deeply managed to embody all of our hopes and dreams, to appeal to the best in each of us, and to remind us of both what a man’s life should stand for, and what he is willing to die for.

And in the preceding examples, dear trolls, please resist the urge to suggest that I am creating a direct equivalence to the aforementioned statesmen and Mr. Williams.  After all, many designated holidays exist not to somberly require our dour reflection on tragic events or matters of gravitas, rather they are charged with doing just the opposite:  they are supposed to buoy us and delight by reminding us that life is wonderful more often than it is terrible, and ultimately less dispiriting than it is inspiring. Folly and frivolity are part of what makes our species unique, and they are also the cause of that behavior which makes us uniquely human: we laugh.  Already, in fact, thousands, perhaps millions celebrate such curious holidays as “Douglas Adams Towel Day”, “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, “Pi Day”, “J.R.R. Tolkien Day”, “George Lucas Day”, Festivus, and my personal favorite, “Kanamara Matsuri”.

And so--what do we do on Robin Williams Day?  How to honor the day dedicated to the man who taught us to tear up our old assumptions, and re-evaluate why we were here, on this planet, trying to fathom our purpose.  That’s easy.  I propose three things.  And no, I am not going to suggest the obvious:  That we all dress like Mork from Ork in rainbow colored suspenders, and run around all day yelling “Shazbot” and “Nano Nano”, or that we have a Robin Williams film festival.  Although doing those things sounds fun and wonderful, and wherever Robin Williams is, I am sure it would make him happy if thousands or millions of people stopped and did that, just one day a year.

Here is what I do suggest we all do next year, in July, on his birthday:  SEIZE THE DAY. 
    
1.)  Dedicate the day to nothing but comedy.  Go to work if you must, and deal with whatever negativity comes across your psychic threshold like a mature adult--but do so quickly, and move on.  What could be more delightful than to dedicate one day a year to seeing the hilarious side of life?  The mind-body connection between laughter and physical health has been documented out the wazoo.  (And wouldn‘t you just love to see Robin do an improv medical riff on the anatomy of the human “wazoo”?).  And I challenge anybody out there to offer a single sane, sober reason why focusing for 24 hours on what is funny in life is a bad thing. You can’t do it.  Right?  It can’t be done.

2.)  Rededicate yourself to understanding those people in your life who struggle with depression and its legion of demons and dragons.  Because of Robin Williams’ suicide, a college friend whom I have known for forty years talked more candidly and unashamedly about her depression than she ever has in all the time I have known her; as a result, I feel a new respect for someone I already loved, and I feel as though our relationship has been both rekindled and enriched.

And no, this agenda does not conflict with dedicating the day to comedy, for I am not suggesting that you spend the day reading articles about this somber subject.  I am merely pointing out that it is impossible to have a Robin Williams Day without thinking sadly about how and why he passed, so a private promise to yourself that you will spend the next year doing your small part for the people you know who suffer from depression seems a fitting way to honor Robin Williams.  

…  And lastly

3.)  Be somebody else!  Be many people else!  It is a bittersweet irony that we were all shocked by Robin’s death, yet upon reflection, it seems that every time we saw him--on a talk show, in a movie, even caught impromptu by invasive modern technology--Robin was clearly being someone else.  Few could equal his dexterity with accents, and nobody, simply nobody, could slip in and out of fanciful characters and personalities with the lighting speed that he could.  Genius.  Simply genius.  So honor his genius, stand on your desk, and bellow the primal “YAWP” in the face of all that frightens and offends and daunts you: you will triumph.

So, on the day that we celebrate his birth, and a lifetime of legacies, emulate Robin:  be a Pirate, a Penguin, a President, a Genie, a Manic DJ, a Quixotic Vagrant, an Unorthodox Teacher, a Spinach Swilling Sailor, a shrink, a Doctor with a Penchant for Practical Jokes, a Cross Dressing Nanny, a Gay Nightclub Owner, a Boy who can Fly, forever caught in his childhood, a man seeking to find What Dreams May Come even after the nightmares … Be improvisational: be a foreigner, a redneck, a snob, a southerner, a salesman, a shrink, a mobster, a swish, a soldier, a man who entertained our soldiers …a person who makes your children proud, your spouse grateful, your neighbors happy--and who makes strangers feel, for a moment, just a little less strange.

Every July 21st, let’s all have Robin Williams Day, and remember him in the style he would have loved.   Let’s watch clips from talks shows and marvel at what can only be called A Beautiful Mind.  Oh Captain my Captain!  Let’s all make it our goal on that day to make lots of people happy.   Let’s all coordinate our watches, everyone all over the world, and laugh one loud long belly laugh together.  There, can you hear it?   Up in the heavens?  Robin is somewhere up there, laughing with us.

By Mickey McClain

We held off on publishing this blog.  The following Dueling Blogs were written ten days ago, but something told us to wait, and see what the week held … Pokemon-wise.  It’s not that we anticipated softening our tone, or rendering some kind of apologia or erratum—which, ironically, we did decide was necessary with our larger project, “The Little Book of Lynching, Part Two”, finished at around the same time.  No, the reason we held off publishing these blogs is that we wanted to see if our fears were affirmed.  And those fears were not so much about Pokemon Go, as such.  Rather, they were about the larger and more frightening trend of opposing parties “cross-talking.”  (That being the case, it is both ironic and eerie that that Pokemon craze really took off during the weeks of the Republican and Democratic Conventions.)  And, no less importantly, our fears were about the larger problem of people who don’t read books anymore not understanding the nuances of debate.

So, Pokemon Goers, here goes:  I have read dozens of articles this week, and my suspicions were confirmed: the majority of your detractors are not objecting to the game itself.  Hey, we get it.  A treasure hunt!  Time honored.  Not as elegant as geocaching, and more simplistic than Ingress, but fun. So far, so good.  Where can I sign up?   But the Pokemon Go defenders have largely failed to listen to the specific and reasonable complaints of the detractors, and as a result, you gamers with your heads stuck up your butts (I know, hard to do while your eyes are glued to the screen) have written these lengthy epistles about what wonderful fantasy and escapism Pokemon Go is, and how you have invented this groovy new-fangled thing called “exercise” and discovered this heretofore hidden treasure called “conversation”, neither one of which were happening while you were down deep in your dungeons playing Arkham Knight, Minecraft, Super Mario Brothers, or Grand Theft Auto.
Hurrah.  You are emerging from your dark basements, breathing the fresh air, and interacting with others of your species.  Walking and talking.  We applaud this, fellow Homo sapiens.  Just don’t forget your sunscreen.

That’s not what we “contrarians” and “curmudgeons” have a problem with.  What we have a problem with is a game that leads children to walk into intersections, and adults who are acting like children to walk off of cliffs.  And no, there are no hyperlinks here.  We are not going to insult you and suggest that you haven’t already read these stories.   So just to clarify, we aren’t discussing what is good about Pokemon Go here.  We are talking about real dangers and disruption, documented world-wide, in alarming numbers, and not one defender has properly addressed that.   IGNACIO ELENCHI.

Nothing in a week has changed this: Nintendo designed a game that is basically unsafe. 
Pokemon Go, as designed and played, is dangerous.  And no, I am not against augmented reality, nor do I think the Oculus Rift is of the Devil.  In fact, I can’t wait for virtual reality.  I can finally tour the Louvre.  See the Pyramids.  Trek to Victoria Falls.  But Pokemon Go is inherently dangerous, and the only way that statement is not true, is if just ONE of the following statements IS true:

a.)    Walking with your head down and your eyes glued to the screen is perfectly safe  OR

b.)    Most everybody who plays Pokemon plays it the way the lawyered-up Nintendo tutorial shows:

WITH THEIR ARM HELD OUT STRAIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM, AT A NINETY DEGREE ANGLE FROM THE BODY, HOLDING THEIR PHONE UPRIGHT, WHILE THEIR EYES ARE CAST AT THE HORIZON, TAKING IN BOTH THE SCREEN, AND EVERYTHING GOING ON AROUND THEM.   (This, by the way, is why parents and grandparents playing with their children are to be applauded:  they have seen the inherent risks, the potential dangers, and are preventing that full stop.  You all have effectively trumped my major argument against the game, you have my hearty congratulations, and you can stop reading now.)

There is no international data base collecting Pokemon-related pedestrian injuries, vehicular accidents, acts of trespassing, EMT and police response calls, or generally rude behavior, but the visual evidence and the reportage is in from all over the world.   Legions of people are behaving in ways that are sometimes rude, sometimes dangerous, often both.  And it doesn’t matter how many there are; once it has been confirmed that in cities and towns all over the world, police, businesses, private properties, sacred places, and oh, just places that are due more basic respect than groups tromping about playing Pokemon Go …they have all had their day-to-day functioning turned upside down by this game.  The very fact that people in such critical public service fields as policing and emergency medical services have had to plead for common sense, post new signs, write new rules, and most importantly, answer more emergency calls, ought to say something to Pokemon Go players.  

Something not good.   If it is negatively impacting every city and town where it is happening in tangible and measurable ways, I don’t need more statistics than that.  It is being played in a way that is fundamentally disruptive, and that is wrong.  And here is where the cross talk happens: your arguments about the benefits of the game are trumped by the problems it is causing.  Until this changes, it doesn’t matter if some good is coming out of the game.  A DICTO SIMPLICITER AD DICTUM SECUNDUM QUID.  As long as a lot of headaches and heartaches are perpetrated on unwilling bystanders—particularly our public servants—then that trumps any fun you might be having.  You don’t get to play games at society’s expense, and if you can’t accept that, then let me suggest now that you run, don’t walk, back to your basement dungeon.  

The arguments and epithets lodged against those of us who have a problem with the game are legion, and they are all flawed.  The defenders rigorously and meticulously avoid these concerns voiced by the detractors, almost as carefully as one might avoid mines in a minefield when playing Pokemon Go in Bosnia.  They say that we are blaming “all the problems of the world” on Pokemon.  No we aren’t.  Just the problems actually being caused by those who play the game stupidly.  That’s created plenty of problems, without blaming global warming or world hunger on those pesky virtual varmints.  They say that we don’t understand the importance of this, that Pokemon Go is just the beginning of virtual reality impinging on the real world.  Of course we get that, and that is precisely why we are so concerned about your behavior. 

And as for all the people who are claiming that Pokemon Go is exactly the kind of escapism that this world needs right now, I say, you are absolutely right.  As long as you are also spending some of your precious time trying to help the world.  And the people in it.  Maybe one of the reasons that the world is in this sorry state is because so many of us are so self-absorbed, and spend so much time in escapism, ever think about that?   It ends up being a circular argument.  CIRCULUS IN PROBANDO.

Only one in four people in the United States ever gets off their fat ass to go volunteer for a cause.  For example, one thin little article claimed that Pokemon Go was actually helping animals in shelters because as a Go stop, one shelter put up a sign saying you could walk a shelter dog.  Here’s a tip:  a lot more dogs would be helped if you would put down your phone and actually go volunteer at a shelter.  
You make fun of us for making fun of you, and then you ask “What would you prefer,  that we play Candy Crush, like you do?  Flame on Facebook, like you do?  Binge watch Netflix, like you do?”  No, what I believe your critics had in mind was read an actual book, with no faces in it.  Go to an actual gym, with no monsters in it.  And make your mark on the world without a screen standing in between you and the experience.

And as for that guy (James Roy) who made the bullet list, and then told you all in no uncertain terms to get OFF his law and to GET a life—here’s what.  Dozens of you congregate on his front lawn all the time, which is both illegal and rude—and even scary.  And your best plan is to mock him?  Kids, in twenty years, when you have a big-ass honkin’ oppressive mortgage, and you spend all of your spare time trying to fight back the insidious crab grass in your damn lawn that is constantly threatening to slither under your front door and choke your children as they sleep, and after you have spent a king’s ransom at Home Depot on petunias and mums and manure and insecticides and herbicides—after you have become a proud homeowner, you tell me how you feel about a bunch of extras from the Walking Dead marching zombielike onto your lawn, kicking over you garden gnomes and trampling a hundred weekends’ worth of work.  That old fart (just 38 yrs. old, BTW) with the smoldering list, he had a right to be upset.  Grow the hell up. 

And speaking of growing up, if the following paragraph doesn’t apply to you, then don’t take offense. How can you even disagree with the following point?  Understanding this distinction represents the nuancing skills of the adult mind.

There is behavior evidenced in the way some people play Pokemon that can be described as nothing less than Social Retardation.   A failure to have developed the skills necessary for navigating society that is nothing short of extreme.  Little armies of rude people taking over places that they clearly should not invade, speaks to the Social Retardation of all those who spend their lives in front of a screen.  Do the research, and you will find that police stations and sheriffs’ departments all over the world are having to ask people to stop playing at these locations.  And this includes instances of players barging into buildings where officers are working, and pounding on the doors of police stations at all hours, demanding entrance, so that they might catch that elusive Pokemon.  For God’s sake, it’s a police station.   And that is not as shocking as the fact that emergency rooms are having to tell Pokemon Go players not to flood in and start playing among and amidst the mangled and the dying.  The fact that numbers of people would even do this is, yes, nothing less than Socially Retarded. And let’s not get started on the allegedly adult couple who scaled the wall of a zoo at 1:30 in the morning to catch a Pokemon.  Even more bizarrely still, players are defending themselves using The First Amendment.   

Listen up, Pokemon players…..in cemeteries…9/11 memorials…the site of the Hiroshima bombing…Holocaust museums…if you need to scream 1st Amendment to justify your playing, then you really don’t get it.  Citizens of any higher civilization have always defined themselves not by what they have a right to do, but ultimately, what is right to do.  ARGUMENTUM AD POPULUM.  Translation: Just because something is legal doesn’t mean you should do it.  I got two words for you:  Fred Phelps.   Did you know that the courts ruled (even upon multiple appeals, to higher and higher courts) that it is quite legal for Fred Phelps and his creepy congregation to stand in Arlington National Cemetery and hold signs that say “God Hates Fags”, while chanting hateful things right next to parents burying their son who died fighting for this country?   For your freedom to play Pokemon?  (Try playing it in some Middle Eastern countries, if you don’t believe me.  They just issued a Fatwah.)  Do you really want to be in the same league as Fred Phelps?  And no, what you do not get to use as a defense is that Playing Pokemon isn’t the same as carrying a sign saying “God Hates Fags”.  Arlington National Cemetery is sacred to this country and its citizens; insults and disrespect can’t be measured, and if you don’t know how upsetting it is, to having somebody cackling and mincing around, catching a fake avatar on top of your loved one’s grave, well I guess you don’t know what it is like to have a father buried in Arlington.

 I do.  I  know. 

And while we are on the subject of hate, could you people please learn the distinction between someone who has “an issue” and this thing called “A HATER”.  ARGUMENTUM AD HOMINEM.   People who are critical of your YouTube featuring your cat in a funny burka with explosives tied to it (Muslim pussy) are “HATERS”.  People who take issue with the two dozen Selfies you have of yourself on Facebook featuring you wearing nothing but a bikini made out your parents old CDs are “HATERS”.   People who don’t think Ball Tapping is the coolest new game ever are “HATERS”.   People who think that you writing your college entrance essay on “why Jackass is your favorite movie” is a very poor choice … are “HATERS.”   

And if we are concerned about all the people surrounding us who are staring down at their phones as they cross Fifth Avenue—or just any old four lane highway, like the fifteen-year-old girl who got hit by a car in Pennsylvania—then surely we must be “HATERS”.   But here’s what.   You could make the argument that we are more concerned about you Pokemon players than you are about yourselves.  You could say that makes us rather parental in our attitude.  But not hateful.  There is something primally parental, in the very best way, about vast numbers of people who dread the idea of naïve children (who naturally think they are bulletproof) roaming into busy streets, dark alleys, dangerous waters, minefields, nuclear plants, or Fukushima death zones.  So please, if you wish to navigate life as successfully as you think you are navigating Pokemon Go, you should probably learn now that it is inaccurate, classless, warmongering, and just plain intellectually lazy to call everybody who has a critique of the way you do something “A HATER”.  By a goddam thesaurus, for chrissake.  And not that stupid college edition.  I am talking about the true Roget’s, with the alphabetized word index in the back, and the front table of contents arranged by the way the cosmos is organized.  Yeah.  Yeah.

In the meantime, I have invented a game of my own, whereby I will walk the  neighborhood with my eyeballs pointed straight ahead, and I will search for 151 Pokemon Go players who are easily caught with my lasso made of dental floss, because they are not paying attention to what they are doing or where they are going.  Gotta Catch ‘em All!  Then, I will take them all down to the gym in my basement, tie them up, and make them read the newspaper, eat their vegetables, play Scrabble, and compete with each other in Model U.N., until they finally “catch” a fucking clue.  And those who misbehave will be sentenced to playing Ms. Pacman for twelve solid hours, wearing adult diapers.

And just a quick word to those of you who keep going on about how now, because of Pokekmon Go, you are now out in the world, socializing.  I will grant you, maybe that’s a jot better than you spending your life in a dark room.  But please don’t confuse socializing over ________ (fill in blank of some stupid coveted monster; I am not going to Google it) with what it means to forge a true friendship.  Get back to me in a year, and tell me where you are on the relationship meter with these goofballs.  A friend is someone who is always there for you—or so some say.  Most of these people won’t be.  A friend is someone who listens to you, even after you have droned on about the same thing—the same break-up, the same job, the same fantasy, the same team, the same roommate, the same professor, the same aches and pains, the same hobby, the same boss, the same relationship, the same the same the same, but a true friend goes right on listening—or so some say.   Doubtful your new Pokemon pals will do that.   A friend is someone who drives you to the airport even if they don’t want to, picks you up drunk from a bar even if it’s two in the morning, and shows up with a pair of jumper cables or a lug wrench, even if it’s storming or there’s a blizzard outside—or so some say.   Think your Pokepartners will do that?  Highly unlikely.  And lastly, of course, there is my definition of friendship:  A friend is someone who will help you move.  Someone who loses an entire gorgeous weekend he could have spent at the beach, or kayaking, or sleeping in—or playing Pokemon Go—because he/she has agreed to help pack your stupid crap into boxes you scrounged from the back of the Piggly Wiggly and the ABC store, and all because you think that moving into your new stupid apartment across town is an integral part of your whole new life plan coming to fruition.  A friend lets you keep believing that.  And a friend helps you move there.   But your fleeting friendships from Pokemon Go?  Pokemon No. 

I have to say, at the end of the day, (or more specifically, at the end of twenty days) there has been a lot of name-calling, on both sides.  And little listening.  But I have really tried to listen.  So in return, I would ask you to listen to this.   In the unchanged blog below, I really made one major misstep.  Rather than rewrite it,  I will leave it stand and apologize for it.  I made a glib remark about all those who would end up dead or wounded at the hands of Pocket Monsters.  “Two words”, I said snarkily…“Darwin Awards.”  And while a little part of me still smiles at the meaning behind that, I forgot the bigger picture.  And in that moment, I was an assface.  Too often, I am an assface.   But the difference between me and some of these gamer assfaces is that I can admit I am an assface.

But back to the big picture.  Let me frame that for you now:  so far we have been relatively lucky.  That famous sideswiping of the cop car in Baltimore left nobody badly hurt.  And the fifteen-year-old girl who was injured ended up smiling for the World Wide Web cameras, and apparently will be just fine. But that can’t last.  It won’t last.  Statistics are the karma of mathematics.  My writing partner shamed me (not purposely) when he brought this reality home: for many years, he worked for the railroad … and lore has it, if you run a locomotive for long enough, you will take a life.  It’s not the engineer’s fault. It’s not the conductor’s fault.   It’s the fault of the fool wearing headphones.  The fool who got drunk. Or the person whose only foolish mistake was being a kid, and not realizing that his childish folly could get him killed.  My partner has never killed a human being while in a locomotive, but he has beaten himself up for every poor dog he ran down, guileless lover of dogs that he is.  And he has watched lives permanently damaged, if not completely destroyed, because they did take a human life.   Breaking a train with a hundred cars of grain or fuel is a cumbersome, dangerous, and often deadly proposition, even when that train is crawling along.  The people running the trains are kind of depending on the good sense of the average person not to amble down railroad tracks.  My partner has talked to men who have to spend the rest of their lives knowing that they killed another human being, because that human being had too many cocktails.  Or took a stupid dare.  Or because he had a bad day, a series of bad days, and decided that this was a good day to die.  And of course, there is the man who is haunted by knowing that his oncoming locomotive was the last thing those two little kids, trapped in the back of the car stuck on the tracks, saw—right before he ran them down.  And all because some douchebag parent though they could beat the signal.   

Now, step back.  Look around at the people playing Pokemon Go.   Watch as they stare at their screens. Watch how they walk.   Look where they walk.   Look at all the innocent people behind their steering wheels, innocently driving their cars.  And now, think of that poor railroad guy, seeing the faces of those two little boys, every night before he goes to sleep … and the look of horror in their eyes. 

Now tell me there are no problems with this game.   Explain it so I understand. 

​This is not a rhetorical question.   I am waiting.