Tag: patriotism

Since I Held You

Ah, another work at home Friday and man, was I fatigued yesterday. I’m hoping that sleeping late this morning and tomorrow will knock the last of the fatigue out of my system. I was more mentally alert in the morning than I’d been since the infusion, but the brain wiring started sparking and malfunctioning in the afternoon. I do hate when that happens, and my legs get super-tired and my feet feel like I’m just dragging them along for the ride. Most unpleasant, actually. Needless to say, I didn’t run any errands on the way home last night, but after getting caught up on the news once I was home, I started doing research again on the 1970s by watching Youtube videos. (It’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten about the 1970s.) Today after work we’re going to go to Costco and run some various other errands, which means I’ll probably be exhausted again tonight. But that’s okay, I feel rested (my legs are still fatigued, though) and it’s always nice to get up to a cat alarm than to the horrible electronic beeping tones of an alarm.

I was kind of bummed there wasn’t a new episode of South Park this week, and I have to say, between the show and Gavin Newsom, I think this marks a sea change in the country. Turns out the MAGArbage doesn’t like being treated the way they’ve treated other people for the last ten years. Aw, they’re needing safe spaces like the precious, unique little snowflakes they are and always have been. But the masks are off them now permanently, and their narcissistic tantrums about “their” country and their “true” patriotism.

Sorry, if you try to overthrow the government, you’re not a patriot. And have we forgotten “Let’s go Brandon”? You’re not a patriot if you’re trying to cram your beliefs and values (such as they are) down the throats of everyone. You’re not a patriot if you celebrate and applaud violations of the Constitution. You can fetish worship symbols you don’t understand (for the record, wearing the flag as an article of clothing is also considered a desecration) all you want, but that doesn’t make you a patriot, especially if you don’t understand and appreciate what they symbolize.

And for the record, I am not about forgiving and forgetting. Straight white people, if and when this horrible period actually ends, will be all about that… just as they were after the Civil War. They always prefer to support other white people than oppressed minorities, to the detriment of the country, and we just wind up back where we were yet again because so many white people won’t address their bigotries and prejudices.

And as for Jillian Michaels, she has always been a garbage person. Anyone who calls herself a “gay woman” instead of “lesbian”? That’s kind of telling. She wants to join, and only associate, with the rich conservative cisgender white gays1. I do take some consolation in knowing that her unspeakable vileness means she is miserable and unhappy; it’s written all over her face. She must really be bitter that she can’t shame and embarrass overweight people on national television anymore. She was a disgrace to the fitness profession, and she’s a massive embarrassment of a human being. I hope she marries someone just like her and forgets the prenup. Irrelevant and useless, why does being a hateful bitch on television make her an authority on history and politics? Because she once had a reality show? Bitch, please.

This week, Taylor Swift announced, on the Kelce Brothers podcast, that she was dropping a new album, The Life of a Showgirl, in October. Yesterday she released the four alternate covers of the album, one of which is this:

One of the covers for Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl.

She looks amazing, doesn’t she? But of course, trolls (who really need to get a life) did what they usually do whenever she does anything. The cover above was shared on social media by some bitter pill of a man in Houston, saying “She has young fans! How is this appropriate?” I personally have seen more skin on the beach or at a pool, and sometimes in the French Quarter. Yes, this is the problem, not a president who’s in the Epstein files for child rape, or all the youth pastors, or preachers, or priests arrested on the daily for raping kids. No, Taylor Swift in a Las Vegas-style showgirl outfit–on theme for her album–is the real problem2 kids are facing today.

God give me strength.

I am pleased to report, however, these zeta males were thoroughly ratioed and dragged in the comments…I don’t understand this sick need some people have for negative attention and being humiliated on-line (probably bots, but in some cases they are actually people), and probably never will.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I will most likely not be back until tomorrow morning.

  1. The Log Cabins are vile, period. ↩︎
  2. Where is all the upset about kids possibly finding out about Laura Loomer and “Arbys in her pants”? Give me a break. ↩︎

California Girls

And here we are at Remote Friday again in the Lost Apartment. I was very tired when I got home last evening, after my doctor’s appointment and running some errands. I went to my first ever podiatrist, and the good news is I don’t have arthritis in my big toes yet, but the bad news is that there’s really nothing to be done about the pronation of my feet, which I was expecting and was kind of a Hail Mary ask. What was super-nice was his PA was a lesbian, which she revealed in one of the most amazingly nonchalant way, and did make me feel better about being there, if that makes sense? (I think the primary care physician I fired last summer was homophobic, if I am being honest. He was certainly dismissive of me and all of my concerns to the point where I was uncomfortable asking him anything. He could just be a shitty doctor, but one of the great joys of being marginalized is never knowing, or being completely sure, if someone is homophobic or not homophobic and just an asshole. Got some serious trust issues, don’t I?)

And of course I slept late this morning! No wonder I was exhausted; I also asked him about the chronic ingrown toenail on my big toe, so he took care of it in the office as an outpatient procedure. I won’t go into details of what he did on my big toe, but for the next week I have to soak my toe twice a day in epsom salts and re-bandage it after applying Neosporin. I always forget those kinds of things are a shock to the body, and it needs rest after trauma, so it takes a while to recover. I’m not used to these sorts of things, which is pretty amazing that these little traumas and shocks to my body didn’t start until I was in my sixties. I’ve always been relatively healthy for the most part, and also…lived in pain for a good portion of my life mainly because it never occurred to me to do anything about it, which is really kind of insane. But all those years of no insurance taught me to live with pain because I couldn’t afford to see a doctor. (I am writing about my low-paying job history and being the working poor, in an essay for my Substack, which I really need to finish and post before I leave for Kentucky on Sunday.) He also gave me a cortisone shot in my right big toe to do away with the reoccurring pain, and it’s actually kind of nice to not have my toe joint hurting for a change. Woo-hoo!

At some point today I have to take a break from working remotely to head out to Metairie to pick up my new glasses, which is very exciting. I have a lot of cleaning to do around here before I leave Sunday morning, but LSU is off this weekend so I am not terribly vested in watching games tomorrow; I’ll have it on in the background but will mostly clean and read for the day. I also was able to read some more of House of Blood and Rain, which is extraordinary, and I am hoping to finish that before Sunday, too, so I can blog about it before I head up there. I’m going to listen to Shadowlands by Peter Straub on the way up there, and probably Lisa Unger on the way home. I am also going to experiment with going a different way than I always have–I always go through Chattanooga–but this time I think, for something different, I am going to go through Nashville. Exciting, no? The drive to Birmingham will be the same; that’s where I’ll leave 59 North and head for Nashville instead of driving through northeast Alabama. I’m not going to worry about doing any writing (or blogging) while I am up there; you’ll simply have to get used to doing without me for the duration of the trip. (I know, I know, whatever will you do without your daily Gregalicious?) It’s also going to be rough being with my conservative family during the election, but I can keep my mouth shut, and years of experience (and knowing they will never change their minds) has taught me how to be honest but noncommittal; it’s not my fault if they interpret my responses as agreement or concurrence. (Example, from 2009: my dad says “Sarah Palin is no Hilary Clinton” to which I reply, “you can say that again.” I can certainly can agree with that statement , right?) But at least I’ll know how the right is taking the results, regardless of what happens. It may be harder if there’s violence, as I expect there to be. (I’m hoping not, but…those hopes aren’t very high.)

I did watch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City last night; as you can see, the excitement level around the Lost Apartment for Halloween was very intense. Paul went to a friend’s party (I was exhausted, as I already mentioned), and so I stayed home, reading and cleaning (very lackadaisically) and watching news clips on Youtube to stay slightly aware of what’s going on nation-wide with the election. All the desperate shrieking from the right side seems to be getting more shrill and hysterical on a daily basis. I also had to laugh at the right being so upset over the false claim that President Biden called them garbage; let’s see, what have you trash called me over the course of my life? Pervert, sinner, fornicator, groomer, pedophile, traitor–so yeah, miss me with the hurt feelings of the “fuck your feelings” crowd. Maybe the lie hit too close to home to the people who know, deep down, they aren’t good or nice or Christian or even decent? Just like the “deplorables” thing. Hillary said one negative thing about “some” of his supporters, while they were chanting “lock her up” and worse, and they lost their fucking minds. They sure don’t like being called names, for a group of assholes who feel pretty strong in their ability to call everyone else names but should remain free of criticism myself. And at this point? I’d correct Hillary to say they are ALL deplorables. Maybe not in 2016, but they sure as fuck know they’re all trash and a disgrace to all humanity now because they’ve seen what he is capable of doing and they are looking forward to the end of our democracy.

I don’t think that’s patriotic, actually. I find it deplorable and disgusting and treasonous. (Someday I will write about how the right wrapped itself in the flag and absconded with the country’s symbols to such a point that the word patriot no longer means what it once did.)

Ugh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, everyone, and I may check in again later.

Downtown

Sunday morning has rolled around again, and I am feeling pretty good. I slept well again before Sparky decided it was time for me to get up, and he let me sleep later (after he started) without much of a quibble. (I like to pretend he cuddles with me in the mornings before I get up because it’s nice; I know it’s because he wants to know the minute I get up so he can start meowing at me to come downstairs with him.) The closing ceremonies for the Olympics are today, which is a shame, as I always love the Olympics. There really is nothing more patriotic-feeling like rooting for young athletic Americans on the wolrd stage, is there? The fact that this was going on while the tides of our election have seemingly all turned to the positive has really been something. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what patriotism is and what it means to be patriotic–and not in the least little bit because the Right has made patriotism so distasteful and embarrassing. I am seeing the crowds at the Vice-President’s rallies moving to take patriotism back from the Christian Nationalists (the flag, the USA chant, etc.) because what they call patriotism is actually anything but. But the Democratic National Convention is going to be pretty thrilling this year, methinks, reminiscent of another dark period coming to an end–the 2008 election ending the nightmare of the eight years of right-wing control and endless wars and lies. I know I am actually excited about the election now, and while the fear and dread are still there, there’s a lot of joy and optimism.

And what an amazing Olympiad this has been, the haters and agents of darkness aside1! so many great stories, so many redemptions, and so much fun to watch and enjoy as always. It also felt different; maybe the fucked up 2020 Tokyo Olympics caused a reset; it didn’t feel like an Olympics and now, all I did was (besides root for our athletes) be happy for the all the competitors and medalists–I finally developed the proper Olympic spirit that doesn’t villainize great athletes from other countries. I never liked that whole xenophobic need for the US to win the most medals to prove our superiority as a nation; I do not want to be anything like the Nat C’s. Probably twenty years ago I might have hated, for example, Rebeca Andrade as Simone’s biggest competition–but this time around I simply enjoyed her skills and abilities and applauded for her just as I did for our gymnasts. I think I have finally unpacked and emptied the last of my conditioning as an American.2

I had a lovely relaxing day yesterday. Paul and I watched Challengers, which was interesting, and then caught up on House of the Dragon, The Serpent Queen, and started watching the second season of the show with Rob Lowe and his son on Netflix, which is cute and funny. I can’t think of the name of the show, but the first season was pretty pleasant and fun, so I hope the second season isn’t a disappointment. Watching these shows about royals struggling over the throne and power put me to thinking, again, about actual history, and of course the Catherine de Medici story, which I’ve always enjoyed. The banker’s daughter who became queen of France and mother herself of three kings and two queens. The show jumped from actual history to nonsense toward the end of the first season, and this second season is diverging dramatically from what actually happened; Queen Elizabeth never visited the French court, nor did Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who actually abdicated and died before Catherine’s husband, Henri II) and likewise, his son Philip II did actually marry Elisabeth de Valois, but it was at her wedding celebration that Henri was killed. And they are starting to set up her daughter Margot’s story, which is also endlessly interesting to me. I’m still reading Rival Queens, the story of the mother-daughter relationship during one of the most treacherous periods of French history. I was also thinking about how people always say George R. R. Martin based A Song of Fire and Ice on the Wars of the Roses; but there’s another series of French histories called The Accursed Kings by Maurice Druon, focusing on the years 1310-1337, about the end of the main branch of the Capetian dynasty and the rise of the Valois branch–and the Hundred Years’ War. This aspect of French history–the lead up to that epic war–isn’t as well known, and I tore through that series when I discovered it at the Emporia Library as a teenager. It’s a great series, a fascinating time in French history (there are many fascinating periods in French history), and you can probably see why I love French history (and France) so much.

I’ve also been thinking, not only about the book I’m writing now but the next Scotty, too. I’ve renamed it Hurricane Season Hustle (saying party instead of season seems like asking for it, frankly), and started coming up with ideas for the plot. I have also been thinking about my short stories in progress, and I think I’ve come up with any number of ways to fix the ones I want to get fixed. My goal is to finish the short story collection this month and get it out of the way while working on the new book. Football season will be here before you know it, which will start taking up my weekends, so I need to be starting to get back to the grind of everything. I did do some cleaning yesterday around the house, too, and plan to do some more this morning before I go make groceries at Rouse’s. I can’t decide if I want to make steak fajitas for dinner, or pepper steak.

I did read a short story yesterday, “The Amateur of Crime,” by Stephen Vincent Benet. It’s an old story, Benet is a famous writer not known for his crime stories, and it was interesting, if a bit…I don’t know, unrealistic? I have found that non-crime writers who write crime short stories for whatever reason always seem to go for the “huh?” solution to crimes. In this case, the amateur detective on the spot is helped by any number of coincidences that also happen to give him the knowledge to solve the crime (there was a Faulkner crime short story that’s solution had to do with cigarette smoke trapped beneath a radiator…again, not realistic), which seemed contrived to me. But it was an interesting story, and again, reading it gave me some ideas how to fix some of my own in-progress drafts, or the ones that are finished but need revision.

There’s always so much writing to do.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines for the day. I do need to make a grocery list before running over to Rouse’s today; nothing major, a little run to get stuff for lunch and to make dinner a few nights this week. But for now, I am going to get cleaned up and do some filing and so forth, so I bid you adieu for now, Constant Reader, and I hope you have a marvelous Sunday.

  1. Hilariously, a while back when I did one of my Pride posts about how white women have always been the worst homophobes, a friend asked me why I didn’t mention the Chatelaine of Castle TERF, and I replied “she gets her own.’ But she is so evil and awful and horrible so regularly that before I can finish writing about her, she’ll do something even worse. Her behavior during these Olympics, along with the haters she’s embraced, was especially egregious and awful. ↩︎
  2. I sometime want to write about this, and the American mythology I was raised to believe that wasn’t the truth but something taught to justify white supremacy. ↩︎

That Was Then This Is Now

Sunday morning after a completely wasted day, in which I just really relaxed and didn’t do much of anything. It was unusual, and I didn’t feel bad for just sitting around and just, you know, having a day off from everything and just wasting it. I still don’t feel bad about it, either. I had a very rough year last year, and while my body is getting healed from everything my brain still feels a little bit off. Taking care of my mental health really is, and has to be, a priority for me. And let’s face it, life keeps coming at me (everyone, really) so fast and there’s so much to worry about and be concerned about and it sucks that every morning I have to wake up worried about what went on yesterday that I’ll find out about that I wasn’t aware of when I went to bed the night before.

I do have to do some things today, and once I am finished with this I’ll have to figure some things out for the week, make a grocery list and all of those fun things, and run that errand during yet another heat advisory (will only feel like 114 today, so woo-hoo!) before coming home for more Olympics. One of the coolest things that happened this year so far was the election turnaround happened just as the Olympics (another patriotic high) started–and the right’s divisive and borderline hateful reactions to the Olympics–has only served to make them look even more weird. Imagine your “patriotism” requires you to hate on our Olympic athletes, or not be supportive of them. That’s how deep the rot and sickness on the Right in this country goes; they aren’t patriotic, and they never have been. (Pro tip: if you have to constantly call yourself a patriot while you’re shitting on other Americans or boycotting the Olympics because of some weirdo freaks on Twitter, you’re not a patriot no matter how much flag paraphernalia you are wearing to bolster your claim, which will always be weird to me.)

I don’t have to advertise my patriotism because I know I love my country despite its flaws, and why I have always held it to a much higher standard–the same one the Founders did–critique and fix, never think everything’s just fine when there are still things to fix, in order to live up to the original principles the country was founded upon. The Founders didn’t think they were gods, and that the Constitution couldn’t be changed. They made it hard to do deliberately–not because they didn’t want the document amended or changed in any way, but to ensure that such a thing was necessary and needed.

And you know, life is hard enough without trying to make it harder for others, which is something I’ll never understand–why do some people insist on trying to make others as miserable as they are? Misery loves company, I guess, which is the really sad thing about humanity. I’m not perfect and I never claim to be, but I like to think I don’t spread misery around–unless it’s deserved. I’m not a turn the other cheek kind of person, I’m afraid. I try not to ever start drama–but if you try to create some I will end that very quickly and you will not try it again. People who cause and create unnecessary drama are people I cut out of my life, because I ain’t got time for your shit, and the older I get the less fucks I have; the field in which I grow my fucks has been barren for quite some time, and shall remain fallow for as long as I live.

My brain has always been a mess; I was talking to Dad about that the last time I saw him, as we talked about my childhood and when he and Mom were married and struggling, and I tried to make him understand how fuzzy my brain had been when I was a child. I had generalized anxiety disorder and ADD as a kid, plus the genetic legacy of the wild mood swings, going from happy to over-the-top hysteria on the turn of a dime. I knew the hysteria was not good, so I started trying to control it when I was young. I also always had a buzzing sound in my head when I was a kid; I really can’t describe it better than that. I also was very stubborn (a family trait on both sides) and willful. I wanted to please my parents, who adored me (I always knew this, even though I always was certain they were disappointed in me–anxiety again), and spoiled me as much as they could afford. I can remember talking to my mom a few years ago–it was probably longer ago than I remember, because she was herself in this memory and not the fading woman she’d been since her first stroke, and I said something about not being an easy kid to raise and she scoffed dismissively. “You were no trouble at all,” she replied, which gave me another insight into my family–they remember things differently. I was always certain I was a disappointment to my parents and failed them all the time growing up; I remember making Mom cry and Dad being disappointed or angry with me.

Probably the most insightful thing I’ve ever said to my parents–not realizing how true this was–that it was a “good thing I didn’t have children, because you two would have spoiled them rotten”–and they would have. They would have spared no expense with my kids, but I never trusted myself enough to be a parent or to want kids. I don’t think I’m up to having them or being a parent, as I second-guess myself with my cat all the time, but knowing how I am…I would have spoiled them myself.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great Sunday, and I may be back later; one never really knows, does one?

I just love these guys.

What Am I Doing Hanging Around

Thursday morning and I slept really well last night. I feel good this morning, not bad for Thursday and my last day in the office. I was kind of loopy and tired all day yesterday, which was weird, and so I didn’t run any errands after work. I just came home and got caught up on the news, and then once again got sucked into the Olympics and did nothing around the house, which is a mess. Tonight I have to do those errands, and the chores when I get home because I’m a bad lazy person who will always put off anything he can until the next day. Ah, well. I never learn, do I? Isn’t that the definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different outcome?

Guess we all know what that means.

But the weekend looms, and I have all kinds of things I need to do to get caught up for the week. Sigh, I always promised myself every weekend that I am going to be better about chores and things every night, but between the excessive heat (“feels like 112 today”), being tired, and the Olympics…well, yes, you can see how I let everything slide. Sparky isn’t any help, either; he always wants me to play with him and go to sleep in my lap and just like with Scooter, I always think okay I’ll sit for a while but then I have to do some things and then I started getting caught up on the news (and yesterday was quite the news day, wasn’t it?), but I don’t think I am going to keep talking about politics on here, even though this perhaps final season of United States is full of surprises, twists and turns, isn’t it?

One of the great ironies of these times struck me last night–the timing of the Democratic July surprise right before we head into the Olympics provides us a lovely contrast, does it not? The entire point of the Olympics is to be welcoming and inclusive for all countries of the world, to bring us all together in an appreciation of sport and young athletes. Our own athletes train hard for years, giving up any sense of normal life and pretty much their childhoods and their teens for the honor of representing their country in a celebration. Making the Olympics is a herculean task; winning a medal is so rare in the world of sport that those who do definitely should be celebrated–but everyone there should be, and should be having a wonderful experience, like all the people who are in attendance. People who walked through an airport anonymously just a week ago are now international stars and celebrities, recognized everywhere they go, and I love that for them. Watching the Olympics always makes me burst with pride for these athletes, and while I always root for every US athlete (because it’s my team), I also am happy for the other athletes too and want to see them have their moment. So, look at what is going on with our political parties re: the Olympics. The entire country is coming together in the spirit of sport…and the Christo-fascists misunderstood something, decided to get offended (and the French do not give two shits what Debbie from Salina, Kansas thinks, and laugh at the notion they’d even care), and BOYCOTT the games and not support our athletes.

Interesting. You admit your country comes second to your faith. So if you’re going to put your faith first ahead of the Constitution, why should we vote for you? That isn’t patriotism. That isn’t supporting and defending the Constitution. Historically, Christians have been responsible for some of the worst genocides in history. I was actually thinking this morning that the Paris Olympic committee should have replied to the evangelical hysteria by saying, “We are Catholics in France and do not care if we offend heretics. Be happy we didn’t reenact the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, or the Albigensian Crusade, weirdos.”

I will also say that those who want to integrate religion into government are not patriots. A true patriot always puts country first, you know, like President Biden refusing to accept the party’s nomination. Your reward is not of this earth.

And doesn’t Matthew 6:5 read “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward“. 

Sounds to me like Jesus was saying performative religion is unholy and gets you nothing in the afterlife.

But why listen to the words of your Lord and Savior? That’s not what modern American Christianity is–and miss me with the #notallChristians bullshit. If you’re not calling out the false prophets in your midst whose only God is Mammon, well…you’re complicit. Miss me with the hurt feelings, too. I’ve never seen such a profound lack of faith as I see in hypocrites like the evangelicals and apostates like Candace Cameron Bure, whose faith isn’t about acceptance and love but judgment. God doesn’t need you to defend him or speak out on his behalf, ravening wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’d prefer you be taking care of the poor and the sick rather than living it up in your mansion while children starve.

What was that Jesus quote about rich people, camels, and the eye of the needle? Maybe you need to take a long hard look at yourself and your toxic beliefs and values–and she has also never distanced herself from her nutjob weirdo brother, either…so it stands to reason the hateful bitch who starred in two shows set in San Francisco is just as big a freaky weirdo as her weird brother. Have fun in hell, Candace–I’m sure God will be thrilled you got rich making shows telling other people how to live and did nothing for charity and no good works.

Bitch.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, and remember, the women’s all around gymnastics is today!1

  1. And how much do I love that Simone Biles dragged MacKeighlah (or however her stupid parents thought you spell Michaela) Skinner for the fucking racist abuse condoning filth she is. Simone ended your tired ass, bitch–welcome to being a cancelled pariah in your sport. ↩︎

Johnny Are You Queer?

I have been wanting to rewatch Johnny Tremain for quite some time now.

When Disney Plus went live, the first thing I did (after subscribing) was search for it there; I did this at least once every two weeks since the service launched, to no avail. I would look for it on Amazon Prime, Netflix, everywhere; whenever I would sign up for yet another streaming service I would look for it. I never quite understood–and still don’t–why Disney Plus doesn’t have it; but the other day at work I realized I hadn’t looked for it for a while, so signed into Disney Plus on my browser: nope. Oh might as well give Amazon Prime a try, I thought, although Disney not having one of its own properties while another streaming service had it was, I thought, highly unlikely.

And yet, there it was: to rent or buy. I didn’t want to buy it, and I really hate paying to rent to stream something when I already pay for far too many streaming services (I really need to get past the mentality of subscribing when I want to watch something when it’s far cheaper in the long run to merely rent the movie or show), but I’v been wanting to rewatch this movie for years and there it finally was; so I did, and rewatched it yesterday whilst making my daily allotment of condom packs.

I also remembered, when I found the film, that Johnny Tremain was my gateway drug to not only my lifelong interest in American history–which eventually led to an interest in history in general. We had an assembly at my elementary school to watch the movie, and I saw it again when it aired on The Wonderful World of Disney (it may even have still been Disney’s Wonderful World of Color). I eventually read the book, which I got from a Scholastic Book Fair, and it became a treasured favorite. I also recognized, before rewatching the movie as a sixty-year-old, that it was a Disney film aimed for kids made in the 1950’s during the Red Scare when we were all living under the shadow of the mushroom cloud; Walt himself was, among many other things, a deeply conservative pro-America anti-Communist homophobe, and given all those things, it was going to most likely be–if looked at with a cold, judgmental, independent eye–a barely disguised propaganda film. (I am also curious to reread the book; since it was published in 1943, during the height of the second world war, it was also probably pro-American propaganda, when all the country needed to be united to believe that we were fighting evil to make the world a better place, and since American democracy was the be-all end-all…you see what I mean?)

I mean, once you recognize and identify Lost Cause mythology as an ideation to perpetrate and protect white supremacy, it’s also relatively easy to start reexamining all of American history and see the mythology that has been built up around the founding and creation of the country, as well as the deification of the Founding Fathers.

But while I was researching the book and movie the other day, I also came across a paper–queer theory–by Dr. Frank Henderson at Furman University that essentially reexamines the text of the novel from a queer perspective looking for subtext: the piece is titled “Could Johnny Tremain Be Gay? Reinterpretation as a Subversive Act” and was published in the Journal of Homosexuality (I read the abstract, and an article about it, rather than paying $40 to access the actual paper and read it; seriously, how do academics research if this stuff is so expensive? I will probably try to track a copy down through the library; which I guess, actually, is what academics do), and it gave me some pause for thought. I do remember that Johnny was more bratty and selfish in the book than he was in the movie (I remember being startled by this when I read the book the first time) and he literally had nothing but disdain for Cilla or any other girl in the book (which, at the time, was part and parcel of that weird societal norm or belief that prepubescent boys think girls are icky and don’t like them or want anything to do with them–again, very odd in a heteronormative culture) but when he becomes friends with Rab, an older boy involved with the Sons of Liberty, he almost idol-worships the older boy and allows himself to forget his innate selfishness and get involved with something bigger than himself–the revolutionary thinking that led Boston to revolt in the first place. That can be read, as Dr. Henderson states, as a queer relationship between the boys, and that Johnny could be read as queer. I seriously doubt that was what Esther Forbes was thinking when she wrote the book–the book was meant for boys and there was, as I said, that weird “boys don’t like girls” norm for a very long time (it certainly was a consistent theme in Disney productions aimed at boys; same with the Hardy Boys book and other mystery/adventure series aimed at boys from the time). This was in theory erased from the film…but I’m not entirely sure it was.

First of all, there’s absolutely no question that Hal Stalmaster, who played Johnny but never really worked much afterwards, mostly guesting on television shows, was a stunningly beautiful young man.

He also wasn’t a very good actor, but the heavy-handed direction of any Disney live-action film aimed at kids for a very long time didn’t inspire the best work from the cast (Mary Poppins, of course, being an exception).

The young actor who played Rab was also ridiculously good looking–and turned out to be a younger Richard Beymer (billed as Dick) who would go on to play Tony in West Side Story and later, Twin Peaks–and they certainly had more chemistry together than Johnny had with Cilla, who was turned into a love interest of sorts, with him giving her a quick peck on the cheek (their only intimacy) as he runs through the streets of Boston with the news that the British would be leaving Boston “by sea”.

The movie was very typical Americana–so yes, propaganda–which sterilized and cleaned up the period in Boston before the outbreak of the war, with rather stiff pronouncements about ideals and principles and freedom and the rights of man and liberties and tyranny–all the patriotic buzzwords cast about by people who want to silence those who don’t agree with them–without any real explanation of what that means.

And yet, as oversimplified and “cleaned up” as this is made to be in the movie, it’s still effective–it’s very stirring to think about the nerve of the American rebels, doing something practically unheard of in history–not just defying their king (there was a long history of rebellions against the worst abuses of kingship throughout the centuries; just the century before the British actually beheaded their king and did without one for eleven or so years; 150 years before Louis XVI went to the guillotine in Paris) but defying the might of the most powerful and richest empire the world had ever seen. It’s hard not to think about–although everyone in this movie is a revolutionary, all Bostonians except for the villains, and the villainous American loyalists are actually worse than the British military themselves–what that period must have been like to live through; the divided loyalties, the betrayal of neighbor by neighbor, spies and treachery and murders. (I’d love to write a historical mystery set in Boston during this period, actually.)

It’s not a bad movie, but it’s also not a great one; and it certainly does its part in upholding the mythology created about the American revolution.

And yes, this could easily be yet another essay.