Tag Archives: Mike Murphy

I Answer the Question,”What Have You Been Watching?”

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I’ve noticed how this pandemic has added a new collection of common statements and questions among people with whom my wife and I socialize, distantly. The common, nearly universal statements are along the lines of, “My god! Did hear what he said/did today?” But a common question I never before heard so frequently, is “What are you watching?”

Those with the luxury of not having to home-school, maintain full-time work obligations or tend to an ill relative have been maxing out their couch potato quota. Being both Catholic and a small town Midwesterner who grew up surrounded by Lutherans, I still have a dim view of people who watch TV in the middle of the day. The tube only comes on after … you’ve earned it. Daytime TV watching was for shut-in old ladies and alcoholics. It’s still that simple.

But after dinner, after putting up a couple hundred bales of hay … or pretending to pay attention in school, a guy out in Montevideo could kick back free of guilt.

So it is today. When paying attention to what is really happening can drive you nuts faster than insipid soaps and sit-coms.

With that in mind, and purely as a distraction, I’ve worked up a list of What I’ve Been Watching, and Listening To since the corral gate closed.

The Plot Against America (HBO). Not exactly light or escapist, but a terrific adaptation of the Phillip Roth novel, wherein (our guy) Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 election, cozies up to Hitler and unleashes torrent of pent-up facism and anti-semitism across the land, specifically on a working class Jewish family and their neighbors in Newark, New Jersey. John Turturro and Winona Ryder are the only two name “stars”. But the production heft of the show comes from the presence of producer/writer David Simon, of “The Wire” fame and also “The Deuce”. The six-part series quite pointedly diverts from Roth’s novel in its ending. (Here’s a spoiler alert interview with Simon on his thinking.) But in its telling, the verisimilitude of the sets, locations, props are first-class Hollywood … with plotting and dialogue compliments of one of the country’s greatest novelists. It’s a statement on who covers pop culture today that “The Tiger King”, the depressing equivalent of being trapped in an elevator with a dozen MAGA grifters, received overwhelmingly more press attention. (I’ve had exactly no one tell me they watched “Plot Against … ” .)

Ozark (Netflix). Clearly the writing team behind this series spent a lot of time dissecting “Breaking Bad” for what made it so compelling. And they decided one magic ingredient was … ever escalating stress and tension. I’ve been a fan since the get-go, maybe from spending some time in the ‘Zarks and sprawling Lake of the Ozarks. (I have my souvenir “Big Johnson’s Halfway Inn” t-shirt.) But maybe mostly because it’s always had Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, two excellent if just-below-the-radar actors. (Bateman has directed several episodes.) The adventures of a corporate numbers guy from Chicago getting cross-wise with the mob and being forced to flee to oblivion … i.e. the Ozarks … where he proceeds to mix up the Missus, the kids and everyone he meets with local heroin dealers, hillbilly trailer trash, the Kansas City mob and the inevitable psychotic Mexican drug cartel, all while running a cheesy floating casino has always been fingernail-chewing fun. But it got even more desperate this season. Not to give too much away, but let’s just say Mrs. Marty Byrde (Linney) develops ambitions of her own. Favorite supporting characters: Darlene, the not so loving spouse of the local poppy farmer, and of course Ruth, Marty’s aide de camp, a child of trash with the feral cunning of El Chapo.

Westworld (HBO). The first season of this series was close to classic television. But then you get Anthony Hopkins in anything and you’ll be convinced it’s Criterion Collection stuff. The way season #1 played with the soon-to-arrive dilemma over what really is consciousness, and then, if something inorganic displays consciousness is it therefore “human”? made for a remarkably intelligent mainstream TV show. Thanks, I strongly suspect, to familial connections to acclaimed film director Christopher “Dunkirk”, “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Inception” Nolan, (his brother Jonathan and wife Lisa Joy run “Westworld”), the show has always worked off an impressive budget. (If you’re a studio exec, it can’t hurt to keep Big Nolan happy.) That said, the second season was a mess. Besides the fundamental dramatic problem of diluting suspense by having every character you gun down, chop up or set afire “rebooted” by a refreshed algorithm, the entire season was pretty much all gunning and chopping and jumping back and forth in time. The “Westworld” on-line chat rooms didn’t seem to mind. But what I felt was a series floundering and searching for the next leap up into serious, speculative science. And that element arrived four episodes into this season’s run. The almost-already-here question of gigantic data bases knowing so much more about you than you yourself know finally showed it’s face. Worse, the data bases and algorithms know so much they can “predict” your future. In effect you are living the life they permit you to live. And have I mentioned the budget for this thing? Stunning production design. I’m hanging with it.

Citizen K (Streaming on iTunes and others.) Even if you’ve heard of “the oligarchs”, the Russian tycoons who leapt in and seized control of huge chunks of the economy after the fall of the Soviet Union, you probably haven’t spent as much time with any one specific character as you do in this new documentary by Alex Gibney, Oscar-winner for “Taxi to the Dark Side”, plus “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” and nearly a dozen others. The character here is one of the original oligarchs, Mikhail Khordokovsky, a guy who managed to corner a massive chunk of the Russian oil industry when benighted Boris Yeltsin came to the early-90s oligarchs for a loan to stave of economic collapse … and win reelection. It is simply impossible to watch Donld Trump operate and not see the guiding, mentoring hand of Vladimir Putin in his flagrant abuse of the truth and creation of a constant, competing alternative reality. Putin is the master. But unlike Trump, who is both a fool and lazy, Putin is disciplined and remorseless. Here, as Gibney tells the story of the war between Putin and Khodorkovsky, (essentially all the original oligarchs have been ruined if not killed and replaced by new oligarchs who owe everything to Putin), we understand the average Russian’s “helpless serf” need for a “strong man” to protect them from chaos. Excellent stuff.

Also, a couple podcasts that have moved up my list of faves.

“Hacks on Tap” Ex-Obama advisor David Axelrod and ex-GOP strategist Mike Murphy take 45 minutes a couple times a week to zing each other and try … try … to make some sense of the Trump administration dumpster fire. Murphy long ago bailed on any idiot who would support a certifiable nut job for the White House, so don’t expect any MAGA zealotry. But these two old pros know “the game” inside and out. Likewise they’re on speaking terms with everyone in the game today who isn’t wearing a scarlet “T” on their chest. Recent conversations brought in guests like ex-Obama Chief of Staff and ex-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who managed the entire show without dropping an F-bomb, and longtime GOP campaign operative Mark McKinnon, (the guy with the big hat on Showtime’s “The Circus.) The consensus of the latter was that Joe Biden needs to actually do this “fireside chat” idea that’s been kicking around. Sit down for an hour every week with Oprah, or David Letterman or, hell, Gail Collins from The New York Times and show America the guy this crew knows to be a regular, decent — empathetic — human being.

“The New Abnormal” Ten, twenty, thirty years from now the line, “Everything Trump Touches Dies” will be stamped like a watermark on this era, and credit will have to go to the guy who authored it, former Republican “master of the dark arts” Rick Wilson. Wilson has had two best-sellers — so far — ripping Trump, the Trump cult formerly known as the Republican party and TrumpNation, a matched set of new ones. The first book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, was as close to what I’d imagine Hunter Thompson doing with Trump as anything out there. And now — via his side hustle gig with The Daily Beast — (always behind the paywall) — Wilson, who lives down on the Redneck Riviera in the Florida panhandle and loves guns as much horses — has teamed up with uber New Yorker Molly-Jong Fast to deconstruct as much of Trump’s self-serving blithering as two humans can without risking strokes. The show just launched this week. But given Wilson’s high-profile on cable pundit-fests — (on MSNBC he once referred to Trump’s best-seller as “The Shart of the Deal”, a line that went over the head of the female host but cracked up other, cruder panelists) — this thing will catch on quick. And always wait for the end, where Wilson and Molly offer their picks for “Fuck That Guy” … of the week. (Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a truly contemptible low-life, got Wilson’s nod.)

What Does “The Press” Know About Trump’s People, Really?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3It appears “the media” has decided we’ve achieved “Peak Trump”. Over the past week coverage of the most fascinating politico-cultural phenomenon of the last generation — at minimum — has turned resoundingly sour and nasty. Conventional wisdom is that this has everything to do with the most recent run of Trump loutishness, beginning with the, uh, unflattering photo of Ted Cruz’ wife, followed by the campaign manager’s “arrest” for yanking the arm of a female reporter and then the business about punishing women who have abortions.

God knows the guy deserves everything he’s getting. But since Trump’s been at this kind of stuff since last summer (and let’s not forget his birther phase), the sudden turn of the NY/DC press establishment is kind of startling. The operative journalist group think explanation is that they are of course merely reporting “what’s out there”, and at the root of what’s out there is Team Trump’s cloddish attitude toward women. I mean, the guy’s a pig! A misogynist! And apparently … We just noticed!

Another (very) possible explanation, because it coincides so neatly with the turn in tone you hear in everything from the evening news, to cable pundits, including FoxNews, is that the press establishment is reacting New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s recent “mea culpa” for the way he and the rest of his journalistic peer group have played “lapdog” for Trump’s ratings-goosing, ad revenue-spiking carnival act.

Said Kristof in his Sunday March 26 column:

“An analysis by The Times found that we in the news media gave Trump $1.9 billion in free publicity in this presidential cycle. That’s 190 times as much as he paid for in advertising, and it’s far more than any other candidate received. As my colleague Jim Rutenberg put it, some complain that ‘CNN has handed its schedule over to Mr. Trump’, and CNN had lots of company.”

It may be pure coincidence that the very week following Kristof’s self and peer flagellation the tide of coverage turned so resoundingly negative. But I suspect otherwise. It was the Times. It was a Sunday, and what Kristiof said was dead-on. Trump has been great for business. Full stop.

The counter to Kristof’s argument largely centered around the amount of Trump coverage that was “unfavorable”. The fistfights at rallies, the “mine’s bigger than yours” quality of GOP debates. All the crap. “We reported that bad stuff, too!” The problem with that defense is that a show biz creation like Trump truly does flourish in a world where all publicity is good publicity. (Shorthand: “All pub is good pub.”)

By another coincidence, last Tuesday I was talking with Chris Worthington, now the head of Minnesota Public Radio’s soon-to-premiere investigative unit. He of course had read Kristof’s piece and his takeaway was the part where Kristof says:

“We failed to take Trump seriously because of a third media failing: We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated. … Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.”

Fundamentally, says Worthington, the story of Trump is the story of his voters. Who they are and why they believe what they believe. There is something to that, if only that were the essence of the coverage.

But on the subject of guilt, Kristof was also guilty of being too polite. (He works at The Times, y’know.)

It’s true “middle class” journalists, and people like Kristof and the celebrity anchors on CNN, MSNBC and Fox are comfortably beyond “middle-class”, and don’t spend a lot of time interacting with the country’s economically distressed. But I’m not convinced economics are a primary motivating factor of Trump’s appeal. Oh sure, he rails on about “terrible trade deals” and jobs some U.S. company has shifted off to Mexico. But I suspect it’s much more his “us against them” theme that grabs and sustains enthusiasm for his cause, and that doesn’t have all that much to do with anyone’s cash on hand, really.

More to the point, besides being busy and operating in a competitive business environment where group think powerfully influences editorial decision making, it’s the rare professional journalist who has a lot of spare time to listen to and dig deeper into the resentments of people who, as I’ve said before, don’t have reason to be complaining as much as they do. A single mom living on welfare? Sure. A laid off coal miner with black lung? Of course. A 40 year-old, high-school educated white guy driving a two year-old pickup, regularly hunting and drinking with his buddies? Not so much.

Traditional media makes regular, good faith effort to report on and demonstrate sympathy for the travails of people living under obvious social and economic oppression. What they have a harder time explaining — much less implicitly sympathizing with — is the plight of a fairly large chunk of the American population that believes it is entitled to more than it has ever made an effort to earn.

Very ironically, two of the best and most lacerating takes on this population have come from the conservative end of the spectrum.

Here’s Kevin Williamson in The National Review. Sample quote: “Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget [conservative hero Edmund] Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.” Or, put another way, Trump’s blame-placing people are their own worst enemy.

Then, over at The Weekly Standard, in a piece on GOP insider’s insider Mike Murphy, writer Matt LaBash says, “I’d like secure borders, more tightly controlled immigration, and would love to see manufacturing jobs come back as much as the next guy. But what about our own culpability in the nation’s decline? The technologies we so ravenously consume as our jobs get automated or algorithmed out of existence. We pretend as though character doesn’t count, then wonder why we get so many characters. We buy cut-rate Chinese goods at Walmart, or better still, on Amazon Prime, so we don’t have to put down the Doritos bag and budge from our easy-chair rage-stations as our passions get serially inflamed by Sean Hannity telling us how great we are and how hard we have it. Our consumption of everything seems to be increasing — of carbs, meth, anger-stoking shoutfests — even as our producers seem to be disappearing. Maybe we have unimpressive politicians because they’re our representatives, and we’ve become grossly unimpressive ourselves.”

Republican insiders specialize in sleight-of-hand class strategies that rarely if ever benefit the Doritos-munching rubes who never the less vote for their candidates. But “the media” which is now portending Trump’s demise is generally too polite to explore the reality these guys have been dealing with.