Potpourri à la Lupica

It’s been a week since I’ve seen anything in the news about Last Tango in Paris. I thought we were supposed to be outraged about that movie. That’s one of the things I hate about Twitter and celebrities. It amplifies nonsense because once one celebrity tweets their outrage, every other celebrity with a Twitter account had better join in or they look like assholes, but only for a couple of days or so. And then it’s on to the next outrage. I don’t even use Twitter, but I’m aware of Twitter outrage and Twitter wars and everything else because half the news articles on the web these days are recounts of what people have tweeted. Continue reading “Potpourri à la Lupica”

The Best Decision I Have Ever Made

Last month, after ISIS beheaded American journalist James Foley and posted the video on the internet, I decided enough was enough. The parade of bad news was an anchor dragging on my sense of well-being. Besides the turmoil in Iraq and Syria, there was news that more than a thousand Russian troops had moved into the Ukraine, there were protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Congress left on summer vacation without addressing global warming or immigration (in fact, this Congress addressed little other than their own reelections). Throughout all this, the cacophony of arguments and counterarguments spewed forth on the television and the internet, never ending, rarely slowing, and devouring such cherished aspects of debate as ‘nuance’ and ‘facts.’ All of this served to foster in me feelings of anger, anxiety, frustration, and even a smattering of despair. This is something that had been building for a long time. Politics is nothing if not a soul-sucking enterprise. It never ends. There is never any resolution to the debates. Increasingly, it has turned into a zero-sum game. One side has to win and the other side has to lose. The greater the pain is for the losing side, the better. Continue reading “The Best Decision I Have Ever Made”