Monday morning and the last few days of 2024; won’t be sorry to see this year end, but also remembering to watch 2025 with a wary eye. Bad years have often been followed by worse years before, after all, and there’s never a guarantee that the new year will be any better. It’s cold here in New Orleans this morning, which didn’t exactly have me leaping out from under my warm pile of blankets. I’ve pretty much decided not to shave until New Year’s, just to see how white my pathetic beard will come in now. Usually it drives me crazy with the itching, but so far so good. Yesterday I ran my errands, did some chores, and then watched Hysteria! on Peacock, which is very interesting and clever in how it’s done (more on that later). Basically, I took the weekend off from pretty much anything except chores and errands, and why not, really? I’m kind of glad New Year’s is in two days; it’s a clear line of demarcation, and I can revamp my life beginning then, while lazily sliding into the new year. LSU plays its bowl game tomorrow, and I imagine I’ll have the football playoffs on in the background on Wednesday while I do things. I don’t really care about them, mind you, but at the same time I have an idle curiosity. I don’t really care about any of the teams that are in the play-offs, nor do I care at this point who actually wins it all this year. My money is on Georgia, frankly, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it’s someone else. I don’t really care.
And of course, Twelfth Night is just around the corner and we can have King cake again! I’m not sure how much of it we’ll have this year, but I’ll definitely buy one to ring in the new season. Paul wants to lose weight in the new year, and it’s not a bad idea for me to try, either. One thing at a time, though–getting a normal gym routine in the new year is way more important than losing weight for me right now.
I was very sad to hear that Jimmy Carter finally passed over the weekend, at the age of one hundred. Carter is the first president whose term I really remember a lot about (I don’t remember much of Johnson; Nixon I only remember Watergate; Ford wasn’t around for long, so Carter was the first time I actually paid attention to what was going on in the country, and what he was doing as president); I remember his election and how wholesome he seemed. He was the only president about whom I can remember thinking his faith is absolutely real, and absolutely Christian. It was during the Carter administration that my own faith began to flail and fail, and it was also when I realized an actual practicing Christian’s faith isn’t the best thing for a president to have, because ruling through faith simply doesn’t work. I didn’t vote in 1980, the first time I was eligible to vote, and I’ve always regretted not voting that year–I didn’t even think about it, and really, my wasted vote didn’t matter to anything other than to me. I voted in 1984 for the first time, and I’ve not missed an election since. I always liked Carter, to be honest; he was one of the few presidents we’ve ever had who was actually a good, totally unselfish person–and he went on proving that for the rest of his life, dedicating himself completely to philanthropy (walking the walk, not just talking the talk). He also was responsible for the Camp David Accords, the only lasting peace in the Middle East (between Israel and Egypt). Who knows what he might have managed in a second term? (Don’t even get me started on the 1980 election.) So, of course, since Carter was a Christian whose values and beliefs guided his judgment as president, evangelicals despise him1. Go figure.
Not really a surprise there, is there? Evangelicals hate nothing more than Christ-like behavior.
The MAGA war goes on, with a lot of “I didn’t vote for this” takes left and right and everywhere you look…but au contraire, mon frere, this is exactly what you voted for. We tried to warn you for ten years, but…we’re just sheep, right? Or hate America? I don’t know what the latest insult MAGA’s love to hurl at the rest of us might be, nor do I care, but I do know I’ve been sneered and jeered at for decades by the so-called “real Americans”–who are actually nothing more than the rebranded Confederates. (One of the most interesting things to me about The Demons of Unrest was how much sympathy there was for the slave-holding South amongst the Union loyalists; which made me wonder about whether the stories about Union sympathizers in the South might be true and not just revisionist, we weren’t all horrible people after the fact apologia–and something I am going to write about someday.) Lots of leopards eating faces on the right over the last few days, for sure….but the one thing that is going to get me through the next four years (assuming everything doesn’t go to hell and the economy and the country don’t completely collapse) is knowing that no matter how bad things get, I didn’t vote for this, and the pleasure I will derive knowing that those who did are not only suffering the way the rest of us are but they also will have to live with the knowledge they voted for it, gleefully.
I feel so pwned, don’t you?
I was curious to watch Hysteria because I really liked the concept and thought it was clever; it plays off the old Satanic panics of the 1980s (which I really want to write about); the murder of a teenager in the town of Happy Hollow leads a small metal band in the town to pretend to be Satan-worshippers as a way to promote the band. Great premise, right? But there’s so much more to it than that, and Bruce Campbell plays the sheriff, and Julie Bowen plays the mom of the band’s lead guitarist. There are several different plots running at the same time, and the way the writers have the stories/plots cross and how those stories only serve to make the other ones seem real…it’s very, very clever, and hard to get across without spoilers. Part of the pleasures of the show is discovering, bit by bit, just how deceptively clever it actually is. We have two episodes left, so they could easily ruin the whole thing in the last two–but we’ll be watching those tonight and will be getting back to you about the show tomorrow, most like.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely New Year’s Eve Eve, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back at some point, most likely tomorrow.
- Ironically, as a born again Christian who liked to talk about his faith, evangelicals originally turned out to elect him 1976. Republicans saw that, and went for the evangelical base–and the country has been the poorer for it ever since. ↩︎
Queer and Loathing in America 