Day 1134 What DWTS can teach us (or not)
Tuesday November 5, 2019
365 Days until the 2020 election and 450 days until the Inauguration
One year to go!
(Or not)
In one year either Trump will be re-elected or perhaps he will have been impeached and removed from office, but that’s not to say he couldn’t run again and win (and be impeached again?)
Let me get to the headline of this screed, then onto other stuff. Dancing With The Stars (DWTS) has as a contestant, Sean Spicer. For the last few weeks he has clearly been the worst dancer left, yet he survives. Not only does he survive, but he doesn’t even make it to the bottom two. The producers changed the rules this season to have the bottom two competitors be left and the judges pick whom they want to keep. This, I think, was to eliminate what has been called The Bristol Palin Effect, where that hapless girl kept being voted through time after time. However, it hasn’t worked out that Sean has been in the bottom two, much to the delight of some of my conservative friends, who think this somehow “shows them” (liberals?). Indeed, it does show me something. It shows me that a hapless guy can make it through if he’s associated with a particular party or administration. Congratulations, you’ve politicized a show that is supposed to be fun. You’re celebrating ineptness. That is a sign of our times.
What I like about DWTS is, not only watching the dancing and the growth of the individuals in their abilities, but it provides a beautiful social experiment writ small. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his famous study on the nature of prejudice and discrimination pointed out that one of the only ways that had been shown to reduce prejudice was to put people in jobs of equal status where they had to work together. Soldiers on the battlefield don’t really care what color your skin is when they are in a fire fight. People doing the same job learn to respect each other’s abilities, etc. One season Rick Perry and Ice Cube became friends. In what other universe would that happen? No, I like DWTS because it brings together people of different generations, and backgrounds; and that in turn let’s folks get to know and respect others. Maybe we need group DWTS classes all across the country?
When I lived in Bethesda, I lived in a community called Bannockburn. It was built on an old golf course. They kept the club house as a community center. We put on a spring show every year. Ninety minutes of singing songs that we changed the words made fun of politicians, and social situations. The best thing about it was how it mixed the generations. Kids learned Gilbert and Sullivan. Adults learned hip-hop. You never would have gotten to know these people otherwise.
I think we need more DWTS and Spring Show events to bring the community together.
Okay. On to politics and crime. There’s been a big dump of the closed door testimony from witnesses that went before the Intelligence Committee in the House.Let me summarize hundreds of pages for you. Rudy Giuliani was hired by the Russian mob and Putin to corrupt the Ukraine, notably, their state owned natural gas company. This company was being run, after decades of corruption, by a by-the-book, clean-as-they-come fellow who had as his goal to stop importing Russian gas of which Ukraine had been dependent on for 93% of its gas. He was succeeding. Rudy was being paid by Lev Parnas to the tune of half a million dollars. Old Lev worked for Dimitri Firnas, who is wanted in the U.S. on multiple corruption charges and is associated with the boss of bosses in the Russian mob, and Mr. Putin.
Aside from that Donald Trump wanted the Ukrainians to create dirt on Biden and for that ask Trump is getting impeached.
365 Days until the 2020 election and 450 days until the Inauguration
PS “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Wait, wait a second, isn’t that Giodrano “Perseus Turning Phineas and His Followers to Stone”?
Yeah, I thought so.