What to Say During an Age of Massacres and Wildfires
Look at a TV screen and you have a case for saying Los Angeles couldn’t handle the fires. To come up with the answering case involves a lot of reading. It’s easier to say the whole business shouldn’t be talked about. At least it’s easier if you don’t remember the last school shooting and what you said back when that happened.
I make the above point because of tweets I saw complaining about attempts to “politicize” the LA fires. This cry is the fallback of people on the defensive. If the right has some misleading talking points about the fires, which may well be the case, the idea is to answer them, not to argue that a crisis can’t be talked about. For one thing, that would rule out discussing climate change and what role it may have played here. For another, handling natural disasters is a core function of government. If government has failed, we’d better hear about it. If they haven’t failed, then it’s time to talk back against the people saying they did. Either way the crisis has to be talked about while the crisis is going on.
Maybe the authorities at hand screwed up, or maybe it was the political system as a whole. Or both, as with Uvalde, where local police chickened out in the face of America’s inability to control who gets the guns. We live in a time of massacres and wildfires. Since they keep happening, we’d better talk about them.
DVD corner. Will Rogers is introduced to Dorothy Parker. “I never liked a man I didn’t meet,” she purrs. Excuse me, what? Well, perhaps Will Rogers has advocated in favor of parasocial relationships, and maybe Mrs. Parker disagrees with him. Now they meet. Quick-witted, Mrs. Parker rises to the occasion. She takes the entertainer’s most famous catchphrase and turns it inside out; laying it at his feet, she lets him know just where she stands on this business of the parasocial. Or, more probably, the screenplay for Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle doesn’t enjoy a firm grounding in smart remarks and how they operate. The idea isn’t to take something familiar and fiddle with it; it’s to do so and thereby make a point. “Age before beauty,” says the young actress, stepping aside for Mrs. Parker. “Pearls before swine,” Mrs. Parker answers. Not, say, “Beauty ages before.”
Researching via Google, I find that the director of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle came up with “never liked a man” etc. An article in The New York Times mistook this dud for an actual Parker quip, prompting the director, Alan Rudolph, to write in and correct the record. Now something called AI Overview attributes the line to Parker, citing the very letter in which Rudolph set matters straight. He said the remark was a little joke between him and Keith Carradine, the actor who played Will Rogers. Very little, as Mr. Spock would say.