The story matters more than who plays what part

Years from now, Jennifer Lawrence will be held up as one of the greatest actresses in this country’s history. In her new movie Causeway, which is available on Apple TV+, she plays a woman recovering from a traumatic brain injury suffered in Afghanistan. In the trailer, Lawrence feels stripped down, barely recognizable at times–which seems right for the story told in the trailer.

To the best of my knowledge, Jennifer Lawrence has never had a traumatic brain injury. She’s just a really good actress. And if you want your movie to succeed, you should cast the best person you can find for each role.

A website called MovieWeb recently published an article titled Armageddon Time Director Defends Decision to Cast Non-Jewish Actors in Jewish Roles. James Gray, who is Jewish, cast Anthony Hopkins, who is not Jewish, to play a Jewish grandfather.

Like Lawrence, Hopkins has a distinguished career. He’s a very good actor. In addressing his decision to cast Hopkins, Gray said, “I take huge offense to that as well. Because that means what people want is [puts on a Yiddish accent] ‘Hello, I am the Jewish grandfather!’ But that’s not what my grandfather was like. And I’m Jewish — I reserve the right to cast someone like Anthony Hopkins. Does that person watch The Godfather and complain that Marlon Brando is from Omaha, Nebraska, and not an Italian New York guy? At some point, we have to acknowledge that our whole function as artists is to try and step into the consciousness of someone else and find compassion and find something of emotional power in doing that.”

Representation counts. It matters. There’s something to seeing someone like yourself on a movie screen and saying, “I can do that, too.” If there weren’t, Martin Luther King wouldn’t have pressured Nichelle Nichols to remain on Star Trek. He told her she was opening the imagination of young girls of color, showing them what’s possible.

There’s also something to be gained by stepping into someone else’s shoes. Anthony Hopkins was born in Wales. He’s not Jewish. As Gray points out, Marlon Brando was born in Nebraska. Jennifer Lawrence is not suffering from a brain injury, but I’m sure there are actors who are.

Watching someone like Jennifer Lawrence or Anthony Hopkins step into a role can open that experience up for other people. Lawrence has always seemed approachable, to the point where an SNL sketch called her annoyingly relatable. To see her playing someone trying to overcome a brain injury might result in more people understanding what it’s like to go through that process. In the trailer, she seems to play the role as if it could happen to anyone.

To see someone like Anthony Hopkins playing a Jewish grandfather steps past some of the stereotypes, such as Judd Hirsch playing Adam Goldberg’s grandfather in The Goldbergs. I haven’t seen Armageddon Time, but if James Gray knows what he’s doing, the story is probably better told with Hopkins in the role than being played the way Judd Hirsch (a successful actor in his own right) plays Pop Pop.

By definition, acting entails being something you aren’t. Done right, it opens up the movie’s experience to those viewing it. What if I were storming the beach on D-Day? What if I had to face anti-Semitism? What if I had a brain injury?

Tom Hanks and Heath Ledger weren’t gay. That doesn’t make Philadelphia or Brokeback Mountain any less powerful. Those movies may have been powerful with gay actors, but it’s hard to fault casting accomplished actors in demanding roles.

It’s not that you shouldn’t cast people who are what they play. You shouldn’t have to bow to the altar of representation in telling your story. You should tell it the best way you can.

Didn’t take long for that states’ rights concept to melt away

It hasn’t been three months since the Supreme Court announced the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The goal, at least in theory, was to allow the states to determine abortion rules, bringing power closer to the people.

That mirage was obliterated yesterday, when Senator Lindsey Graham proposed a nationwide 15-week abortion ban should Republicans retake the House and Senate this fall. The proposal is seen as a compromise of sorts, as some Republicans wanted a more stringent proposal and some, worried for the potential to take the majority, wanted looser restrictions.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell paid lip service to the idea that the states should decide, saying “most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level,” but Graham was adamant that his proposal would see a vote if the Republicans win control. “After they introduced a bill to define who they are, I thought it’d be nice to introduce a bill to define who we are,” he said.

If others sign onto Graham’s overreach, it should put an end to any pretense about freedom or state’s rights. Recent polling indicates support for some measure of abortion rights. Several states are codifying abortion protections.

As we’ve previously covered, if the goal is to reduce abortion, we were doing a good job of the that before Dobbs was overturned. Republicans, in their zeal to, uhh, return power to the states, have been pushing against sex education (calling it pornography* and grooming) and contraception. (*Seriously, if you want to keep sex ed away from students, there are better ways than calling it porn.)

If Graham is so eager to abandon the stance his party took less than three months ago, it’s fair to ask what might come next. Why fart around with ideological concepts when you can just take power?

Is a national ban on contraception far behind? How about denying a class of people the ability to enter into a legal contract (civil marriage) based on gender? What about taking some of the local controls being implemented in local libraries and taking them nationwide? No truly free country would allow its citizens to read Madame Bovary or How to be Anti-Racist. Someone might feel bad.

I became a conservative because I believe in liberty. I believe as long as you don’t materially harm others, you should be able to do what you want. I also believe that in many circumstances, Reagan was right: the scariest words you can hear sometimes are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Lindsey Graham wants to help this country be remade in God’s desired state–or maybe he just wants to control things. Either way, his agenda shows an increasing Republican penchant for proclaiming freedom, as long as you’re rigidly compelled to be free in all the correct ways.

The last thing I want is for someone like President-elect (in his mind, at least) Newsom to actually gain power. But if I have to choose between that and a Republican party that wants to supplement its own flavor of cancel culture with things like travel bans and getting around the Constitution via civil suit–and maybe take those things national, Gav is by far the lesser threat to freedom.

Scientific American: The term JEDI is racist, misogynist, ableist, and reactionary. And stuff.

Stupid, but necessary disclaimer: Each person is a creation of God and that we’re called to love them and treat them accordingly. As soon as I brand someone as them and beyond the call to love, I condemn myself first. Diversity and inclusion shouldn’t be something we have to debate about. That said…

Cancel culture is often miscast, but it’s real. This nonsensical screed (in Scientific American, of all places) about the horrible use of the word JEDI is an example.

The problem starts with the reframing of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. JEDI should never be used as an acronym for an inclusive effort because the Jedi are racist, misogynist, racist, and ableist. And capitalist. Then again, so is the entire Star Wars galaxy.

“Misogynist fool. Only now, at the end, do you understand.”

The article points all of this out for us, and then some. That’s right, this is science, so there’s no room for debate. Or something.

It damns George Lucas’s creation for everything from Ronald Reagan’s use of the term Star Wars for the 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative to the fact that Disney bought the Star Wars universe long after Lucas created the Jedi and because, well, you know, Song of the South.

(Note: Back in the day, conservatives like me corrected people who called SDI Star Wars because the term was used to ridicule the program–which was a major part of Reagan’s strategy to end the Soviet Union. But facts should never get in the way of a morally pure justice-based damnation.)

Because SDI was labeled Star Wars, JEDI is bad.

Along the way, we’re also reminded of Princess Leia’s slave costume, something about the depiction of Darth Vader being ableist because he’s more machine than man now, twisted and evil.

It’s Obi Wan who is apparently twisted and evil. And ableist.

If you thought the only think missing was a shout out to Star Trek, think again. The mere presence of Star Wars Trek…whatever memorabilia, such as posters “can reinforce masculinist stereotypes about computer science–contributing to women’s sense that they don’t belong in the field.” I guess all that praise for Nichelle Nichols and Carrie Fisher acting as role models to women of color and women in general is just the scifi/fantasy equivalent of copaganda.

The very presence of posters for the series this woman starred in oppresses women.

Finally, dismissing this stupid, harmful claptrap as…well, stupid, harmful claptrap proves the point because “such a reaction reveals how easily Star Wars and JEDI can introduce distractions and confuse conversations.” The people who wrote the article are the ones introducing the distraction and confusion. Apparently, we’re all too stupid to figure out that Star Wars is a set of movies and diversity, equity, and inclusion is a real-world thing.

Stances like this may help the authors and people who agree with them feel more committed and virtuous than anyone else, but they harm the very causes they’re trying to advance. What’s more, they feed the mostly false narrative that social justice efforts are primarily interested in an Orwellian thought-control effort that eliminates freedom of thought for all except the enlightened few.

The fact that Scientific American chose to publish this article may allow its authors to add the science banner to their argument, casting opponents as anti-science. But it also cheapens the magazine’s other content.

It also damages the necessary and difficult discussions we need to have.

There’s only one response for this crap.

Conservatives, who used to belittle safe spaces, now want some of their own. SMH.

(For those who aren’t culturally hip, as I am, SMH means “shaking my head.”)

Safe spaces are the ultimate societal loss.

Safe spaces are areas or occasions where a group can go with its own kind and not feet triggered or threatened in any way by outsiders.

Safe spaces as a temporary refuge for support are one thing. As a way of life they foster all the color and variety of this sign.

Conservatives have rightly railed for years against safe spaces, which generally exist on college campuses, which are already safe for most marginalized populations.

There’s merit to needing a place where you can go to talk to people who’ve gone through what you’ve gone through. Alcoholics Anonymous and any number of help groups do invaluable work in those areas. And there’s even merit to racial and other groups to go have discussions about their experiences.

Even among conservatives, the Wednesday morning club was a group where Hollywood conservatives could be with their own kind. While Tom Selleck, Patricia Heaton, Drew Carey, and a few others have found success, political conservatism is often unwelcome in show business.

Instead of a gratuitous Magnum picture, here’s the Drew Carey Show.

A safe space to draw support and help each other manage life is one thing. Living in a safe space is quite another. Without any challenge to your ideas, you enter an intellectual echo chamber where orthodoxy to some vaguely defined norm is increasingly expected. Over time, anything short becomes apostasy that must be punished.

A former University of Missouri professor demanding that a student journalist be removed from a safe space. She lost her job over this.

That’s what’s happened when you hear period stories of conservative thought being penalized in Hollywood and on college campuses.

Fox News host Dan Bongino has a solution to what he perceives as liberal intolerance: safe spaces for conservatives. On his Dan Bongino Show, he said, “We have to evacuate these liberal states and shrink the federal government to the point where we can live in our own freedom and liberty-loving enclaves.”

Dan Bongino, whose commitment to what he considers conservative values is so strong, he needs a place where they can’t be challenged.

Within a minute, he said that liberals support spying, which is interesting considering how earlier this week his colleague Tucker Carlson called for cameras in classrooms so what teachers teach can be monitored. Nothing says freedom like a government-watched camera in your workplace.

Conservatism used to stand for diversity of viewpoint as well as race, religion, and sexual orientation. Those days are gone.

Safe spaces as a way of life are for cowardly wussies whose ideas can’t stand up to criticism and whose fragile egos get bruised at the slightest challenge.

Safe spaces as a way of life are for cowardly wussies whose ideas can’t stand up to criticism and whose fragile egos get bruised at the slightest challenge. The very concept of living in an enclave where I can spout what I want (as long as it follows established orthodoxy) without listening to alternative viewpoints isn’t utopia. It’s the Soviet Union.

Whether it’s liberal snowflakes or conservative bullies insisting on them, they’re antithetical to freedom. If the First Amendment only applies to “reasonable” thought, it doesn’t exist.

Having lived in the mid-Atlantic states, I’ve been to Civil War sites. The prison at Andersonville in Georgia should be a warning message to anyone pining to fight the liberals or the fascist assholes. The Gettysburg Battlefield applies as well.

Andersonville prison from the Civil War. Rhetoric by guys like Bongino is taking us closer to this. But he’s getting paid, so…

In those places Americans were killing Americans. In some cases, family members and close friends fought against each other.

Aside from being cowardly, Bongino’s safe spaces are a step toward repeating that period in our history. We don’t mean more segregation of ideas, we don’t need more yelling, we don’t need more angry self-justifying rants.

We need to start listening to each other.

Team names aren’t what they do in soccer (football), so now they’re bad? Please.

I don’t care what they decide to call the current Cleveland Indians. In a perfect world, you should be able to call a baseball team that without it leading to the trivialization of a culture and a desecration of what that culture finds sacred.

Clearly, this is not a perfect world.

The Indians, known by many as the Cleveland baseball team, has followed the former Washington Redskins, now known as the Washington Football Team, as the first professional franchises to change names because of social concerns since the Washington Bullets NBA team changed to the Wizards in 1997 because team owner Abe Pollin didn’t like the connotations of violence given Washington’s murder rate at the time.

Baseball will go on in Cleveland whether the team is known as the Spiders (my choice), Rockers, or some other choice. But a new choice is bouncing around the fringes and it doesn’t seem to be going away–naming the team nothing at all.

Uhhh, no.

A guy named Tyler Carey, a digital producer for Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC, proposed that, uhh, solution in a piece published last week.

After all, he wrote, in International Association Football (we ignorantly refer to it as soccer), it’s common for teams to go without names. The teams are referred to by their cities or the named of their clubs: Manchester United Football Club (FC), Manchester City FC, or AC Milan. Even in American soccer (Major League Soccer), it’s common for teams to go without nicknames. Los Angeles FC or Atlanta United FC. The Columbus Crew of the league attempted to rebrand as Columbus SC, with Crew being used as informal name. After a strong backlash, the team decided to retain Crew as their name.

Carey acknowledged that the Crew rebranding was unpopular, but says foregoing a nickname would be something new and provocative. It would emphasize Cleveland as a proud city. And it would avoid any potential for “for the name to elicit the same kind of controversy ‘Indians’ did for decades.” In a poll conducted by the station, no name came in fourth, with 15.2% of the vote. According to Carey, this proves that fans are at least open to the idea.

As my mom used to say, if 15.2% of your friends jumped off a bridge would you?

It’s a horrible idea with horrible justifications. Just because Europe choses not to officially brand its soccer teams doesn’t make those leagues somehow purer. As the recent Super League debacle shows, money is every bit the driving factor in European football as it is in American football or any other major American sport.

Aside from the Crew debacle, Americans have a deep connection with team names. Nike’s Boston Red Sox City Connect uniforms were unique, intriguing, and creative, honoring the Boston Marathon. The baseball cap was magical. But they also stripped the Red Sox identity completely from the uniform set. There literally wasn’t a stitch of red to be seen.

Nike’s other city editions so far (the White Sox and Marlins) have similarly de-emphasized names in favor of cities–they are City Connect uniforms. The Marlins jerseys were (A) gorgeous and (B) included the team name in small print. The White Sox just said Southside. When Nike proposes an MLB jersey, the teams have final say–and the teams like extra revenue from licensed apparel–especially when revenue from physical attendance is radically reduced.

Marlins City Connect Uniforms. They are beautiful. They even make drop shadows work.

Carey also writes that if there’s no name, there’s no chance for controversy, which assumes that controversy is always legitimate. While I don’t agree that the Atlanta Braves and Kansas City Chiefs should be renamed, I understand the reasoning behind it. I even understand the push to renamed the Texas Rangers. But then what? Patriots (because of current political usage)? Jets (because of carbon emissions)? Giants (body shaming)? Dodgers? Twins? Browns? Mets?

Fans in the big four team sports identify with their team names. I’m a Mets fan, not a New York National League Baseball Club fan. My son is a Lightning fan. My mom likes the Yankees. Many of my neighbors and friends like the Buccaneers or Bucs. Most American sports fans root for the team, not the city (or state [Minnesota] or close-by body of water {Tampa Bay]). That’s how we do it here.

Nothing like rooting for a body of water. Yay for the Bay, I guess.

Choosing to do it differently because that’s how soccer and Europe do it, or because there’s no chance of offending anyone, is offensive in itself and, quite frankly, paternalistic as hell. It assumes that because we do something here, it’s wrong, then goes looking for reasons to justify that supposedly obvious truth.

New isn’t always better. And when you have to look that hard for justification for some new enlightened idea, maybe it’s not enlightened at all. Maybe it’s just pretentious.

Mask Wars, Episode XXVIII

My wife and I went to Publix last night to pick up a few things. About a quarter of the people there wore masks. The rest didn’t. You’ll never guess what happened next:

People got groceries. They paid for them. They went home. No one yelled at anyone for not wearing a mask. No one decided the people wearing masks were putting their freedoms at risk. It was just a Monday night at the grocery store.

People shopping at Publix and not losing their minds over masks.

News coverage would lead you to a different conclusion. According to this Yahoo News story, the mask wars are here to stay. They cite a restaurant in Mendocino, California that charges people extra if they order while wearing a mask, and another in Washington, DC that informs customers No Mask, No Hummus.

The story seems to have a slight bias toward the people who wear masks and want others to wear them, pointing out that Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican said “It’s not that hard, just wear a damn mask.” It omits that he said that last November, as we were heading into the wintertime surge and before vaccines became available.

The story also points out that about 10 million people in this country (about 2.9%) have immune deficiencies that prevent them from wearing masks. The question is whether we should wear masks going forward for 2.9% of people (especially when they functionally can’t get the Covid from vaccinated people).

It references a Vice column that says people are wearing masks because they were traumatized. Everyone was traumatized. It was that kind of year. Some will retain the masks as a check against that trauma, and other will create a massive bonfire of masks. Trauma runs both ways.

Meanwhile, as the media view masks as another front on ever-increasing culture wars, the rest of us are figuring it out day-by-day.

Perhaps, instead of worrying about restaurants in California and DC, we should do what people do in a free country: let people choose and mind your own business.

I understand that you’re worried about freedom, but that freedom includes my decision to stick a piece of fabric on my face. I understand your deep, abiding care and concern for others, but that doesn’t give you the right to dictate life choices for others, so you feel comfortable about your concerns.

If a business asks me to wear a mask, I wear it. If it doesn’t, I tend not to. I’m vaccinated and breakthrough infections are statistically minor exception. In the event I get a breakthrough infection, the science says I’m a dead end. For me to transmit the virus to someone else would be an exception to an exception.

But if you want to wear a mask, God bless you. If you run a business and you want me to wear a mask on premises (my employer is one of those businesses), God bless you.

You do you. I’ll worry about me.

Like pretty much everyone in the country right now. Most of us have real-life concerns, like work, picking up groceries, and fixating on Donald Trump’s pants.

Florida social media law requires private businesses to accept government overreach (except Disney, of course)

For a time, I was impressed with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In spite of the campaign ad where he all but humped Donald Trump’s leg, he made some surprisingly un-Trumplike decisions. Then he went back to leg humping.

Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump

His latest grind against the former President’s ankle is a law he signed that prohibits technology platforms from suspending or banning accounts belonging to political candidates in the state. Fines range from $25,000 per day to $250,000 per day per politician, depending on the level of office the offender is running for.

Suspensions of up to 14 days or the removal of individual posts is allowed under the new law. And Florida residents will also be able to sue companies for suspensions or bans for up to $100,000.

One the reasonable side, the law requires more transparency for all users when their account is suspended. It’s not uncommon for someone to find their account locked with no specific explanation about what caused that discipline, beyond “Here’s are rules; you broke one of them.”

I lost my first Twitter account that way. To this day, I don’t know what caused it. As social media platforms benefit from businesses run on them, the businesses deserve warnings and a specific reason for any accounts being frozen or locked.

The harm in this law far outweighs the benefit. The law would create two special classes of users. The first is any company that runs an amusement park in the state. They’re exempt from being sued. Basically, the law indicates you can’t ban someone for saying that Donald Trump clearly won the election and that January 6 was a tour group–unless you’re Disney, because they pay their lobbyists good money to make sure they’re treated well.

The second is anyone running for office in Florida. Under the terms of this law, they can say anything they want under this law, and other than two weeks in the penalty box, there’s not a damn thing social media companies can do about it.

The First Amendment right to free speech doesn’t apply to private companies. My employer could fire me for this blog post and be Constitutionally covered if they did. If I walk into my neighborhood bar and say it’s time to kill Nancy Pelosi, they can throw me out. So can Twitter, Facebook, and the other socials. To force them to carry content would be turning privately owned services into public accommodations.

The irony is that Republicans are using government power to tell these private companies exactly how they need to run their business. And Democrats are saying the government needs to get off their backs and let them run their businesses as they see fit.

Republicans’ devotion to free expression is just as limited as Democrats’. In their world, Colin Kaepernick has no right whatsoever to kneel during the national anthem. But Twitter and Facebook must be required to carry opinions blessed by Donald Trump, the man who fondled the flag Colin Kaepernick is supposed to have disrespected. Freedom of speech means saying what they want when they want it, Evelyn Beatrice Hall and Voltaire be damned.

When the validity of the First Amendment applies only to sentiments supported by one political party or the other, it loses all its value.

President Trump incited an insurrection on January 6. He was clearly in violation of terms for any of the social media platforms he used. After a multitude of warnings–more than you or I would’ve gotten–they banned him. The platforms that coddled him violated their terms with their hosting companies and were forced to shut down because they wouldn’t comply with terms in contracts they signed. Conservatism used to stand for responsibility. When you violate the terms of a contract, you pay the price.

Conservatism doesn’t stand for that any more. It stands for using the power of the government to bury anyone who disagrees with you.

Florida became substantially less free with this overreach. Then again, Ron DeSantis doesn’t believe in deregulation. He, like the guy whose leg he humps, believes companies should be free to do their bidding only.

A jacket and tie wasn’t oppression at Bishop Scully High School; it’s not oppression in legislative session

This post started as a rant that started when a Facebook group that I’m in for a male perspective of a health problem blew up. I think I was part of the problem for saying that there’s sex and there’s gender and certain things are specific to people who were born male, regardless of how they identify. I stand by that statement and assert there’s not a bit of bigotry in it.

It pissed me off.

Then I read about how Jay Leno is apologizing for jokes about Asians, including a joke from 2020 indicating that Koreans eat dog meat. He’s going to host a reboot of the game show You Bet Your Life (apologies to gambling addicts, the dead, and the undead, but I didn’t name it when Groucho Marx started hosting in in 1947).

Then I read how legislators in Rhode Island, Montana, and Iowa are arguing over dress codes during session, because dress codes are “colonization language.” Wearing a jacket and tie is now apparently a vestige of racism and colonialism. (If I’d have told Sister Mary Kay that in Bishop Scully High School, I’d still be staying after school even though it closed in 1990.)

Earlier in the week, I wrote about protests against Chuck Lorre’s new show The United States of Al, in part because it romanticizes occupation forces. That would mean not only does that show have to go away, but everything from Hogan’s Heroes to M*A*S*H to Magnum, PI (the outstanding original) to Magnum PI (the gaudy unnecessary reboot) would have to go away.

A lot of women romanticized this occupation force 40 years ago.

I really want to rant about it. And maybe I just did. Maybe that’s just me leaning hard on my white, male, heterosexual, Christian, work-from-home privilege. (Yes, I was instructed work-from-home privilege is a thing, too). Maybe I’m just an asshole wanting to be an asshole without being called on it. Maybe I’m a racist son of a–, well, you know, but that work is misogynist, so…

Maybe I need a heepin’ helpin’ of cancel consequence culture for not treating every sin like a moral one.

So I thought about it some more and decided that maybe I need to listen a little more, but maybe it’s possible to say “No I don’t think so” to some of this stuff without being a horrible privileged asshole who needs to be canceled (by the way it’s hard to say that cancel culture doesn’t exist when that’s the verb people use when they gather to pronounce someone unemployable on Twitter).

I went to Catholic school and wore a tie for three years. I worked in the New York State Legislature for a couple years and wore a tie every damn day to session. It’s part of the gig. If you don’t want to follow the rules of the gig, don’t take it. It’s not like you can’t wear a jacket and tie and honor your heritage.

Wear a damn tie to session. (And that one’s pretty awesome.)

For the record, targeting anyone for violence because of their race, color, creed, sex, gender, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), disability status, or anything I missed isn’t what you do in a free society or as a Christian. And all of those people should have equal opportunity for the life you and I enjoy without thinking about it.

That doesn’t mean that every slight is a federal case or that you don’t sometimes say “Dude, if you don’t like the TV show, don’t watch it.” And maybe the uneven, “oooh, look a new shiny thing” justice of the massive Twitter jury shouldn’t be the final arbiter.

With each of the gripes in this post, I seriously considered that I might be wrong and that people really are oppressed by it. Maybe the answer is, as Commissioner Goodell once said, that if one person is offended you have to have the conversation. And maybe I’m just an asshole justifying my assholocity. (New word, I own intellectual property rights.)

Or maybe there’s a balance.

Or maybe I’m wrong.

I don’t know.

Cancel culture exists and the reaction to Chuck Lorre’s new sitcom might be it

Chuck Lorre has made CBS a ton of money, His stable of shows rivals Norman Lear, Garry Marshall, and Dick Wolf (among others) as the most successful runs for any show-runner in television history. Although the Allison Janney/Anna Faris vehicle Mom ends its run next month, Lorre still has four CBS shows: Young Sheldon, The Komiskey Method, Bob Hearts Abishola, and the new United States of Al.

Chuck Lorre (Photo by Brian To/FilmMagic)

It’s the last of those shows that’s causing a ruckus on the socials. Sin number one is that the main character, Al, is a Afghan translator for the US military–and he’s not played by an Afghani. Actor Adhir Kalyan is from South Africa and is of Indian descent. For another, the show romanticizes the relationship between US forces and Afghan translators. For a third, it’s racist. As writer Rekha Shankar tweeted, “Can someone tell Chuck Lorre that ‘what if a white person liked a brown person’ is not a TV show concept.”

And all of this ruckus stemmed from a 90-second trailer that’s aired over the last week or so.

Resa Aslan, who worked on The Leftovers is also working on the show and said the show actually has four Afghan writers and takes a risk in portraying an Afghan Muslim. He said “There are dozens and dozens of Afghan interpreters living with US soldiers. We know cause we actually spoke to them. This is literally their story.”

As to the casting, Aslan–who’s hardly a MAGA fan–said they tried 100 Afghan actors, but couldn’t find the right person for the role. He also said the show works “hand in hand” with a group called No One Left Behind, a non-profit “dedicated to ensuring that America keeps its promise to our interpreters from Iraq and Afghanistan.” Their website actually includes the trailer posted above.

A NYU author Arash Azizi tweeted, “Adhir Kalyan is an Indian-South African actor born in apartheid South Africa. In 2021 America, he is told he can’t play characters outside his own ‘race’. I guess he is familiar with this Apartheid thinking?”

In other words, it’s not like they made up Fisher Stevens or Mickey Rooney up to be an offensive stereotype of one of them fer-ners.

Fisher Stevens in the 1986 movie Short Circuit.

Lorre’s been criticized for insensitive content on The Big Bang Theory and former CBS show Two Broke Girls, but has also been praised for Bob Hearts Absishola. And I’ve found Mom to be a snarky, but poignant look at the lives of alcoholics and the struggles with their relationships.

This show seems to be one of the first to try to deal with some of the thorny issues stemming from the second Gulf War. If it romanticizes occupation forces, as one critic charges, then Magnum, P.I. would’ve been guilty of the same. Yet its treatment of the aftermath of the Vietnam War was roundly praised by war veterans.

That’s Tom Selleck as Magnum, not some other guy.

To be fair, this type of outrage over a show that hasn’t aired yet isn’t new. In the early 80s, while Tom Selleck was romanticizing occupation forces, Tony Randall starred in an NBC sitcom called Love, Sidney, in which he played a gay man. Before it aired, there was an uproar by the same type of people bitching about cancel culture now, demanding that they cancel the show because Randall’s character was gay.

The show aired for two seasons to so-so ratings and the world didn’t end.

This show could be a steaming pile of racist crap. Or it could use comedy to expand the way we see something.

We’d never know if people got their way because of a 90-second promo and and a high-level understanding of the show’s premise.

Bruno Mars is no more guilty of cultural appropriation than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or (gulp) Weird Al

In a radio interview last week, Bruno Mars defended himself against accusations of appropriating black culture in his music. In an interview on a radio show called The Breakfast Club, the American Music Award (AMA) and Grammy winner said, “You can’t find an interview where I haven’t talked about the entertainers who have come before me. The only reason I’m here is because of James Brown, Prince, Michael. This music comes from love and if you can’t hear that, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Bruno Mars

Mars has a Filipino mother and a Jewish father. Has been accused as straight-up stealing from black artists. in 2018, a writer named Seren Sensei wrote that Mars takes “pre-existing work and he just completely, word-for-word recreates it, extrapolates it. He does not create it, he does not improve upon it, he does not make it better.”

Seren Sensei

He’s hardly the first in since the birth of rock and roll to face those accusations. In 1956, Elvis Presley covered Hound Dog. Three years earlier, the same song was released by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thorton, spending 14 weeks on the R&B charts. Louie, Louie, a Kingsmen song that resulted in FBI investigations for its allegedly lewd lyrics (they aren’t) was as cover of a 1955 original by Richard Berry.

Marvin Gaye’s original version of Heard It Through the Grapevine is an undisputed classic, written in 1966 for Motown Records by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. Gaye was the third to record it and his version was ranked 81st in Rolling Stone’s top 500 songs of all time. but Credence Clearwater Revivial’s version is still remembered. Tainted Love by Soft Cell was a cover of an original by Gloria Jones. Twist and Shout went to number 17 when it was released by the Isley Brothers in 1962, but the Beatles took it to number 2 two years later.

Much of the early history of rock and roll consists of white people covering songs first written or performed by black people and making a lot of money (while the original artists are ignored and don’t make a lot of money).

Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin have all be accused of cultural appropriation from blacks. Except for Zeppelin, they gave credit to the artists who inspired them.

But the people Bruno Mars is accused of stealing from–Prince, Michael Jackson, and James Brown–aren’t relatively obscure artists watching while someone makes a mint with their songs. All of them were icons on their own. None suffered in relative poverty while Bruno Mars lived the life of luxury.

The music industry is filled with remarkable covers, some of which reimagine the original songs in new and inspiring ways. Check out Sturgill Simpson’s cover of The Promise, originally released by When in Rome in 1988 (perhaps the most 1980s song ever).

As great as Simon and Garfunkel‘s Sounds of Silence is, Disturb’s version is more powerful. That’s not appropriation, it’s a cover version, something Linda Ronstadt made a career of.

And if Bruno Mars is guilty of appropriating Michael Jackson’s music, what about Weird Al Yankovic? Fat? Eat it? He didn’t just appropriate the song, he appropriated the music video and, in the case of Bad, the album cover.

Weird Al, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and even Bruno Mars, give credit where it’s due. Covering songs has always be a part of popular music. And tipping the hat to musical influences (as Muse did to INXS in Panic Station), is an equal part of it.

No one would consider what Muse did a theft, so it’s silly and harmful to make the same accusation of Bruno Mars.