Category Archives: The Evidentialism Files

The Living Obit

Interview with Jack Nicholson | Interviews | Roger Ebert

I got a call this weekend from a former colleague at USA Today. He was refreshing the obituary on Jack Nicholson.

Refreshing obits is one of the few truly unpleasant tasks for a newspaperman. Any paper worth its salt has to keep an updated obituary on file, ready to go on deadline, for every politician, actor or athlete of national or international note, alive and aging. Walk into the Times or Post and you’ll find obituaries waiting for Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, even Michael Jordan. And many more.

It’s a grim pile. And my colleague had to add fresh material for Nicholson’s.

When he reached out, I gave the same response a mother does when the phone rings in the middle of the night: Did something happen?

No, Bryan said, he just wanted to catch up on procedural duties in corona downtime. And he wanted me to give an anecdotal story, as I interviewed Nicholson a few times.

First I was touched. Then I felt old. Now I want to start a new trend in the media.

I call it Living Obits. Why do we wait to collect loving anecdotes about someone once that someone can’t hear them? Have you ever left a job, and been told what a great asset you were? It was a rush, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t you have wanted to hear that sooner?

So…Living Obits. The Times and Post sure as hell aren’t going to shake up something as sacred as their obituaries. And today’s social “media” kids don’t even have $600 saved up. They’re gonna be forward looking?

Thus, fuck them. We are proud to announce it here, now. I’ll begin the obit the way they should read, then add the anecdote I sent Bryan.

Rest in Pause.

Jack Nicholson, a three-time Oscar winner, 12-time Academy Award nominee and largely considered the greatest actor in Hollywood history, did not die today. He is 82.

Nicholson, who is survived with pals  Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, is a lifelong Lakers fans and can usually be seen courtside.Danny DeVito is listed (or ranked) 1 on the list Famous Friends of Jack Nicholson

Friends and even casual observers say fond things of Nicholson, including one twit who somehow found a working computer:

Jack Nicholson was the least-ostentatious Hollywood star I’ve ever met.

How un-ostentatious? The first time I met him, he greeted me coming out of the crapper.

Nicholson was doing press interviews for The Departed, the last Oscar-nominated film in which he’d star. And he’d granted USA TODAY a rare interview at his home, on the famed “Bad Boy Drive,” a.k.a. Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills. It was so called because its residents included TinselTown scoundrels Nicholson, Warren Beatty and the late Marlon Brando.Hollywood Hellraisers: The Wild Lives and Fast Times of Marlon ...

When I got to the house, there was a sign over the gate doorbell: Do not ring before 10 a.m. A maid let me into the cluttered, unremarkable four-bedroom house Nicholson bought with the money from Easy Rider. “He’s coming down,” she said. “He’s upstairs.”Easy Rider at 50: how the rebellious road movie shook up the ...

A minute later, Nicholson ambled down the steps, tucking a button-down short-sleeve shirt into his pants and buckling his belt. “Sorry about that,” he said, zipping up. “I was in the can. Wanna  sandwich?” 

And I realized: Even with someone as famous as Jack Nicholson, it’s hard to break bread with a man who just finished with his pants and the can. I politely declined, opting instead for iced tea. 

Nicholson brought it out, along with a pot of coffee and a new pack of cigarettes for himself. He finished both in the 2-hour interview in his living room, which offered a panoramic view of the Santa Monica Mountains.Ws Zo Aerial Pov View Of Mulholland Drive Home Of Actor Jack ...

Nicholson said he never cottoned to many of the trappings of fame. He didn’t own a fleet of cars, only a Mercedes-Benz 600 he’d driven for 30 years (he considered it the best touring car of all time).

Nor did he want a mansion. He didn’t need more space, and the neighborhood, he said, was too important to him to move. He said he’d drop by unannounced to visit with Beatty. And Brando, with whom he shared a driveway, was a “riot” to live near, Nicholson said.

“He would sneak into my house while I was out,” he said. “One time, he left a pair of his underpants in the kitchen. No note, no nothing. Just his drawers, spread out on a shelf in the fridge. He was hilarious.”

It was the most colorful interview I’d ever done, and remains one of my fondest memories in a career full of them.

Still, I’m glad I passed on the sandwich.

 

 

Say Amen, Somebody

President Trump participated in a prayer before speaking at the Evangelicals for Trump kick-off rally at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami in January.

Some stories deserve an echo chamber. This from today’s New York Times:

The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response

Trump’s response to the pandemic has been haunted by the science denialism of his ultraconservative religious allies.

By 

Ms. Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism”

Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.

At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States. Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans. And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a “Cult of the Green Dragon,” cast environmentalism as an alternative — and false — theology.

This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.

Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as “pansies” and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church “when the rapture is taking place.” In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”Evangelical pastor mocks 'pansies,' won't close church for coronavirus

By all accounts, President Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base. In his daily briefings from the White House, Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures.

Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course, and not every churchgoer in these uncertain times is showing up for services out of disregard for the scientific evidence. Far from it. Yet none of the benign uses of religion in this time of crisis have anything to do with Mr. Trump’s expressed hope that the country would be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” He could, of course, have said, “by mid-April.” But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of “packed churches all over our country.”

“I think it would be a beautiful time,” the president said.

Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good. When you’re engaged in a struggle between the “party of life” and the “party of death,” as some religious nationalists now frame our political divisions, you don’t need to worry about crafting careful policy based on expert opinion and analysis. Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned. Fealty to the cause is everything; fidelity to the facts means nothing. Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.

In an interview on March 13 on “Fox & Friends,” Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, called the response to Coronavirus “hype” and “overreacting.” “You know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next, ah, their next attempt to get Trump,” he said.Jerry Falwell Jr. answers criticisms, says Liberty University 'did ...

When Rev. Spell in Louisiana defied an order from Gov. John Bel Edwards and hosted in-person services for over 1,000 congregants, he asserted the ban was “politically motivated.” Figures like the anti-L.G.B.T. activist Steve Hotze added to the chorus, denouncing the concern as — you guessed it — “fake news.”

One of the first casualties of fact-free hyper-partisanship is competence in government. The incompetence of the Trump administration in grappling with this crisis is by now well known, at least among those who receive actual news. February 2020 will go down in history as the month in which the United States, in painful contrast with countries like South Korea and Germany, failed to develop the mass testing capability that might have saved many lives. Less well known is the contribution of the Christian nationalist movement in ensuring that our government is in the hands of people who appear to be incapable of running it well.

Consider the case of Alex Azar, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has had a prominent role in mismanaging the crisis. It seems likely at this point that Mr. Azar’s signature achievement will have been to rebrand his department as the “Department of Life.” Or maybe he will be remembered for establishing a division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, designed to permit health care providers to deny legal and often medically indicated health care services to certain patients as a matter of religious conscience.Trump sticks embattled health chief with coronavirus response ...

Mr. Azar, a “cabinet sponsor” of Capitol Ministries, the Bible study group attended by multiple members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet, brought with him to Health and Human Services an immovable conviction in the righteousness of the pharmaceutical industry (presumably formed during his five-year stint as an executive and lobbyist in the business), a willingness to speak in the most servile way about “the courage” and “openness to change” of Mr. Trump, and a commitment to anti-abortion politicsabstinence education and other causes of the religious right. What he did not bring, evidently, was any notable ability to manage a pandemic. Who would have guessed that a man skilled at praising Mr. Trump would not be the top choice for organizing the development of a virus testing program, the delivery of urgently needed protective gear to health care workers or a plan for augmenting hospital capabilities?

Or consider Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and another “cabinet sponsor” of Capitol Ministries. As a former pediatric neurosurgeon, Mr. Carson brought more knowledge about medicine to his post than knowledge about housing issues. But that medical knowledge didn’t stop him from asserting on March 8 that for the “healthy individual” thinking of attending one of Mr. Trump’s then-ongoing large-scale campaign rallies, “there’s no reason that you shouldn’t go.”Did Ben Carson Fall Asleep During Trump's Coronavirus Briefing?

It is fair to point out that the failings of the Trump administration in the current pandemic are at least as attributable to its economic ideology as they are to its religious inclinations. When the so-called private sector is supposed to have the answer to every problem, it’s hard to deal effectively with the very public problem of a pandemic and its economic consequences. But if you examine the political roots of the life-threatening belief in the privatization of everything, you’ll see that Christian nationalism played a major role in creating and promoting the economic foundations of America’s incompetent response to the pandemic.

For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have lined up with the anti-government, anti-tax agenda not just as a matter of politics but also as a matter of theology. Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, one of the Christian right’s major activist groups, has gone so far as to cast food stamps and other forms of government assistance for essential services as contrary to the “biblical model.” Limited government, according to this line of thinking, is “godly government.”

 When a strong centralized response is needed from the federal government, it doesn’t help to have an administration that has never believed in a federal government serving the public good. Ordinarily, the consequences of this kind of behavior don’t show up for some time. In the case of a pandemic, the consequences are too obvious to ignore.

Katherine Stewart (@kathsstewart) is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”

The Corona Diaries

Image result for take the money and run movie

Episode X: Take the Money and Run

 

Make no mistake: I have every intention of cashing the $1,200 check the Trump administration promises to send to every working American to get through the coronavirus pandemic.

But make no mistake: This “relief” package must have been thought up by the magna cum laudes at Trump University. Because this has bogus PHD written all over it. Image result for trump university funny pic

I’m not a math guy. I don’t get how numbers work except in magic tricks (and I usually screw those up). But even a rudimentary grasp of division illuminates the screw job by the president.

Consider how much $2 trillion is. And we’re going to get a one-time payment of $1,200 to live perhaps well into the summer? Where, dear lawmakers, do you live? What do you do for food? Have you ever tried so see how far you get on $1,200?Image result for how much is a trillion

About this far.

This is clearly an impossibility in the Economic Darwinism that is U.S. capitalism, but let’s say for a moment that the government decided to  put that money into the hands of the U.S. populace (the people who actually run the economy).

There are 246 million adults in America, according to the latest census data. A $2 trillion stimulus would put a check of $8,130.10. Cut another way, $1,000 a month for eight months (nearly through summer entirely).

We are already flirting with the idea of a Universal Basic Income for Americans. The estimated cost of living, proponents say, puts a UBI at $1,600 a month.

What an opportunity to test the theorem! In a limited window. With capped relief funds. While Americans are open to new realities in a post-corona world.

Instead, we’ll get $296 billion of the $2 trillion relief fund. The other $1.7 billion will go to the corporations our lawmakers say are in desperate need of an influx. Don’t worry, they say: Look how well the $800 billion bank bailout helped the working class in 2008.

That’s not piss; it’s trickle down economics, homes.